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?
Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. Anything is possible.
The first thing to recognize not just about Afghanistan but about any poor undeveloped country is that as big as it looks on the map, it's much bigger when you're there.
True charity is the desire to be useful to others with no thought of recompense.
True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will say that I am mad?! The disease had haunted my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Of all the sense of hearing acute.
Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.
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