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?
Musicians want to be the loud voice for so many quiet hearts.
The worst time in any writer's life is the two months before publication. ALL writers become mental and pathetic, even those of devout faith, who have some psychological healing to lean up against, and gorgeous lives. All writers think that this time, the jig is up, and they will be exposed as frauds.
Music has the capacity to touch the innermost reaches of the soul and music gives flight to the imagination.
The writing gets done away from the keyboard and away from the studio in my head, in solitude. And then I come in and hopefully have something, then I wrestle with sounds and picture all day long. But the ideas usually come from a more obscure place, like a conversation with a director, a still somebody shows you, or whatever.
I put down the camera long ago, you know? I was here in London, aged 19, and I was obsessed with my camera, shooting everything I could. Then someone stole it. It helped me to see things for the first time.
I always feel that whatever isn't necessary shouldn't be in a poem.
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