Far off, men swell, bully, and threaten; bring them hand to hand, and they are feeble folk.
Interpretation
People often appear bold and threatening from a distance, but up close, they can be quite weak and timid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote reflects on the nature of human behavior, suggesting that individuals who seem powerful and aggressive when separated by distance often lose their bravado when confronted directly. This highlights the disparity between perceived strength and true character, revealing that many who posture boldly may lack substance and courage when faced with real interactions.
In practice
In a motivational speech discussing the true nature of courage.
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?
Or shall I go out as a light does, not first blown out by the wind, but grown tired and weary of itself - a burnt out light? Or finally, shall I blow myself out, so as not to burn out?
Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at ease before his own hearth.
In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
We need to incorporate that age-old concept of redemption into the work that we do in the criminal justice system in California.
You would be very ashamed if you knew what the experiences you call setbacks, upheavals, pointless disturbances, and tedious annoyances really are. You would realize that your complaints about them are nothing more nor less than blasphemies - though that never occurs to you. Nothing happens to you except by the will of God, and yet [God's] beloved children curse it because they do not know it for what it is.
A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.