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?
If, sir, men were all virtuous, I should with great alacrity teach them all to fly. But what would be the security of the good if the bad could at pleasure invade them from the sky? Against an army sailing through the clouds neither wall, nor mountains, nor seas could afford any security.
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.
The truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect.
I believe in a world where there are no heroes, and I've read and know humanity a lot. There are moments that I admire in a person courage, intellect, hard work. These are the qualities I admire in an intellectual, in a writer, and there are so many people who have these things.
Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?
Theology moves back and forth between two poles, the eternal truth of its foundations and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received.
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