We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.
Interpretation
We often fail to fully express our true selves due to fear or societal pressures.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson reflects on the idea that each person carries a unique and divine essence within them. However, many individuals struggle to fully express their true selves, often feeling ashamed or constrained by societal expectations and personal vulnerabilities. Emerson encourages us to embrace our individuality and recognize the inherent value in the ideas and identities we represent.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about embracing one's true self.
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?
Bad company is like a nail driven into a post, which, after the first and second blow, may be drawn out with little difficulty; but being once driven up to the head, the pincers cannot take hold to draw it out, but which can only be done by the destruction of the wood.
The scientists who attack mainstream religion, rather than striving for peaceful coexistence with it, damage science, and also weaken the fight against fundamentalism.
Alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know
My benefactor told me that my father and mother had lived and died just to have me, and that their own parents had done the same for them. He said that warriors were different in that they shift their assemblage points enough to realize the tremendous price that has been paid for their lives. This shift gives them the respect and awe that their parents never felt for life in general, or for being alive in particular.
Men will be just to men when they are kind to animals.
In today's highly interdependent world, individuals and nations can no longer resolve many of their problems by themselves. We need one another. It is our collective and individual responsibility to protect and nurture the global family, to support its weaker members, and to preserve and tend to the environment in which we all live.
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