Fear always springs from ignorance.
Interpretation
Ignorance breeds fear; understanding can dispel it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote suggests that fear often originates from a lack of knowledge or understanding. When we are ignorant about something, it can lead to anxiety and fear, but gaining knowledge can help alleviate those feelings and empower us to confront our fears with confidence.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
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 ask for what reason our Lord was unwilling to state the time of His coming (cf. Mk. 13:31-32). If we ask it, we shall not find it is owing to ignorance, but to wisdom. For it was not to our advantage to know; in order that we being ignorant of the actual moments of judgment to come, might ever be as it were on guard, and set on the watch-tower of virtue, and so avoid the habits of sin; lest the day of the Lord should come upon us in the midst of our wickedness.
Knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge - broad, deep knowledge - is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low.
It is hard to follow one great vision in this world of darkness and of many changing shadows. Among those men get lost.
Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
You can't buy a good reputation; you must earn it.
I get people to truly accept themselves unconditionally, whether or not their therapist or anyone loves them.
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