No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
Interpretation
Personal character is fundamental, and external circumstances cannot fix flaws within ourselves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes that true character comes from within and that changing external circumstances will not mend inherent personal flaws. This quote serves as a reminder that self-improvement requires inner work rather than relying on outside conditions or situations to change for the better.
In practice
A motivational speaker might use this quote to highlight the importance of inner strength at a conference.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Authors from whom others steal should not complain, but rejoice. Where there is no game there are no poachers.
INTERPRETER, n. One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.
We must understand the connection between inner solitude and inner silence; they are inseparable. All the masters of the interior life speak of the two in the same breath.
I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be annihilated: that is how I see the end of the world.
Nevertheless, the central affirmation of the Reformation stands: through no merit of ours, but by his mercy, WE HAVE BEEN RESTORED to a right relationship with God through the life, death, and resurrection of his beloved Son. This is the Good News, the gospel of Grace
An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
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