Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.
Interpretation
Good breeding combines kindness and the ability to be independent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson highlights the importance of good breeding as a virtue that encompasses both kindness towards others and the independence of thought and action. This union suggests that true refinement comes not just from social etiquette, but from a deeper moral character and self-reliance, promoting respectful and compassionate interactions while also valuing autonomy.
In practice
In a speech about personal development, one might say: 'As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, 'Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence,' which reminds us to cultivate both our compassion and our self-reliance.'
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?
Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions.
An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it's beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth... Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.
You can accomplish by kindness what you cannot by force.
An expert is someone who has succeeded in making decisions and judgements simpler through knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
No one knows you better than you know yourself. Do the thing you want. Don't wait for someone else
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