Most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means.
Interpretation
Great achievements often arise from questionable methods.
Ralph Waldo Emerson reflects on the idea that throughout history, many significant accomplishments have not come from honorable or ethical means. This suggests a complex relationship between morality and success, highlighting that the ends can sometimes justify the means, regardless of the questionable nature of the methods employed.
In practice
During a debate about historical leaders, one might use this quote to illustrate how some leaders achieved greatness through unethical actions.
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?
If you haven't met Satan recently, you are probably going his way!
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There's a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.
Everybody sees me as this sullen and insecure little thing. Those are just the sides of me that I feel it's necessary to show because no one else seems to be showing them.
It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was.
My father once told me that a happy ending is just the place where you choose to stop telling the story. So this is where I choose to stop. More things are still going to happen, of course, some good, some bad. Some things never get any better. When people die they stay dead. None of us knows why we love, or why we stop loving, or why everyone we love we lose.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.