Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.
Interpretation
Constructive criticism should be positive and helpful rather than negative and destructive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the importance of delivering criticism in a constructive manner. Instead of being harsh or unproductive, criticism should aim to guide and inspire individuals towards growth, much like a gentle south wind that nurtures rather than an east wind that brings harshness.
In practice
In a team meeting when discussing performance feedback.
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?
How can you get very far, If you don't know who you are? How can you do what you ought, If you don't know what you've got? And if you don't know which to do Of all the things in front of you, Then what you'll have when you are through Is just a mess without a clue Of all the best that can come true If you know What and Which and Who.
Don't take guilt trips. Take a trip to the mall, to the next county, to a foreign country, but NOT to where the guilt is.
In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.
It is the part of a wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not to venture all his eggs in one basket.
How many times must a man look up Before he can see the sky? Yes, 'n' how many ears must one man have Before he can hear people cry? Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows That too many people have died? The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, The answer is blowin' in the wind.
Speculation is a parasite feeding upon values, creating none.
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