It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.
Interpretation
The quote encourages individualism and the importance of self-care over merely living for others.
Ralph Waldo Emerson highlights the common tendency for people to prioritize the needs and expectations of others at the expense of their own desires and aspirations. He urges individuals to take responsibility for their own lives and to pursue their own happiness and fulfillment, asserting that true authenticity comes from living for oneself rather than seeking to please others.
In practice
During a motivational speech, one might say, 'As Emerson reminds us, it is easy to live for others; we must strive to live for ourselves.'
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?
He saw something that makes a man doubtful of the constancy of the realities outside himself. It was the shocking discovery that makes a man wonder if I've missed this, what else have I failed to see?
All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons; chiefly do they torment freshly-baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless new-born infants.
Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself.
The greatest of all crosses is self. If we die in part every day, we shall have but little to do on the last. These little daily deaths will destroy the power of the final dying.
Not much longer shall we have time for reading lessons of the past. An inexorable present calls us to the defense of a great future.
There's a difference between making incremental improvements and making sweeping changes that take you away from your core values.
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