Every man's task [his 'great dream' and impassioned life-goal] is his life preserver.
Interpretation
A person's life goal serves as their source of strength and survival.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the importance of having a significant purpose or dream in life. It suggests that pursuing one's passions and goals can provide the motivation and resilience needed to navigate life's challenges, much like a life preserver that keeps a person afloat in difficult waters.
In practice
During a motivational speech about pursuing dreams.
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?
You don't have to start from scratch to have a massive impact on the world.
Just write. If you have to make a choice, if you say, 'Oh well, I'm going to put the writing away until my children are grown,' then you don't really want to be a writer. If you want to be a writer, you do your writing... If you don't do it, you probably don't want to be a writer, you just want to have written and be famous—which is very different.
See every problem as an opportunity to exercise creative energy.
Nothing ever built arose to touch the skies unless some man dreamed that it should, some man believed that it could, and some man willed that it must.
I'm a survivor in a business that constantly rejects you.
Given the right circumstances, from no more than dreams, determination, and the liberty to try, quite ordinary people consistently do extraordinary things
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