We love force and we care very little how it is exhibited.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on humanity's fascination with power, regardless of its manifestation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote points to the inherent human attraction to force and authority, suggesting that people often admire strength and power without critically evaluating the means by which it is demonstrated. This highlights a certain ambivalence about morality; while individuals may profess to value compassion or justice, they frequently celebrate or accept harshness and domination in practice, revealing a contradiction in human nature.
In practice
In a discussion about political power dynamics, one might use this quote to illustrate the acceptance of power at any cost.
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 ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between creation stories.
What comes into the world to disturb nothing merits neither attention nor patience
I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.
To be ashamed of one's immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one's morality.
The true opponent in a debate on emptiness is your own ego.
A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together.
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