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?
I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.
Lukewarm people will serve God and others, but there are limits to how far they will go or how much time, money, and energy they are willing to give.
Contemplate to see that awakened people, while not being enslaved by the work of serving living beings, never abandon their work of serving living beings.
There is no use in running before you are sent; there is no use in attempting to do God's work without God's power. A man working without this unction, a man working without this anointing, a man working without the Holy Ghost upon him, is losing time after all.
If you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left.
No man can avail himself of the forces of his creative imagination, while dissipating them.
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