In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes creativity in conversation by using familiar language to express new ideas.
Ralph Waldo Emerson highlights the art of communication, where one can convey fresh thoughts and insights through the use of conventional words. This illustrates how innovation does not necessarily require new vocabulary; rather, it underscores the importance of perspective and originality in expression, suggesting that true engagement comes from the ability to reinterpret familiar concepts in ways that resonate uniquely with the audience.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a public speaking event to inspire creativity in discourse.
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?
The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN. He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralize about it. He did not even think the law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.
Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.
To be born in India is to arrive into the world swimming in religion.
How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash.
The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.
Can any man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace or their father and mother.
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