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?
I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.
From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
I like books that are fat and full.
The distinction between a gallery and a museum is enormous. The gallery is about looking at a thing of beauty; the purpose of the activity is an aesthetic response. The museum is actually about the object that lets you get into somebody else's life.
You try to be as original as you can be without thinking about statistics. You just go from the soul and from the heart.
A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.
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