I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.
Interpretation
Emerson emphasizes the importance of genuine connection over superficial gestures.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that true expressions of friendship or camaraderie require more than just physical gestures, such as a handshake. He implies that for a connection to be meaningful, it must involve the entirety of a person—emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually—rather than just a mere outward display of friendship.
In practice
In a speech about meaningful relationships, one could use this quote to highlight the value of true connection.
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?
The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restored and sorrows end.
I want to be distinguished from the rest; to tell the truth, a friend to all mankind is not a friend for me.
The vulgar crowd values friends according to their usefulness.
Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendship’s more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments.
Those were happier days, when there was still close friendship at times between folk of different race, even between Dwarves and Elves.' It was not the fault of the Dwarves that the friendship waned,' said Gimli. I have not heard that it was the fault of the Elves,' said Legolas. I have heard both,' said Gandalf[.]
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