Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.
Interpretation
Conversation is a skill that everyone continually practices throughout their lives, making it a competitive art form.
Ralph Waldo Emerson highlights the significance of conversation as not merely a form of communication but an essential art that one practices daily. He implies that since everyone engages in conversation, the art lies in mastering it amidst universal competition, emphasizing its importance in human interactions and relationships.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about improving communication skills in personal and professional life.
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?
You don't know how much artists go through to make it look so easy. It's all in the practice.
The theater requires an essential gullibility that you can't get through life without having. If all you can feel is skepticism-well , you meet people like this. Run away from them. They're not good people.
Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow.
I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.'
It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote -- the world I created -- as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.
I was kind of thrown into - I didn't expect to do this for a living, being a recording artist. I was just playing music for the fun of it and writing songs. That was kind of my escape, you know, from the humdrum of the world.
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