Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that material wealth is insignificant compared to love, truth, and moral integrity, which hold sacred value.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson contrasts the triviality of commerce and material pursuits with the profound importance of love, faith, and truthfulness in one's character. He asserts that these deeper human aspirations and virtues are what truly matter and hold sacred significance in our lives, suggesting that one's character and relationships are far more valuable than any commercial success or material gain.
In practice
In a speech about personal values, one could use this quote to highlight the importance of integrity over material success.
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?
Everyone remembers his past with greater vividness as the present becomes more important. Dying men in their last delirium are supposed to see their whole life spread out before them.
If one believed in angels one would feel that they must love us best when we are asleep and cannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in every twenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind.
Suddenly Yankel was overcome with a fear of dying, stronger than he felt when his parents passed of natural causes, stronger than when his only brother was killed in the flour mill or when his children died, stronger even than when he was a child and it first occurred to him that he must try to understand what it could mean not to be alive -- to be not in darkness, not in unfeeling -- to be not being, not to be.
I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.
Australia's treatment of her Aboriginal people will be the thing on which the world will judge Australia and Australians - Not just now, but in the greater perspective of history.
In the usual progress of things, the necessities of a nation in every stage of its existence will be found at least equal to its resources.
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