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?
We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones.
No social stability without individual stability.
In general there is something puzzling about the fact that the most renowned figures in chess - Morphy, Pillsbury, Capablanca and Fischer - were born in America.
Folly loves the martyrdom of fame.
The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.
What is the good life? What is the good man? The good woman? What is the good society and what is my relation to it? What are my obligations to society? What is best for my children? What is justice? Truth? Virtue? What is my relation to nature, to death, to aging, to pain, to illness? How can I live a zestful, enjoyable, meaningful life? What is my responsibility to my brothers? Who are my brothers? What shall I be loyal to? What must I be ready to die for?
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