Health is the first muse, and sleep is the condition to produce it.
Interpretation
Good health relies on sleep, which is essential for its maintenance and promotion.
In this quote, Emerson emphasizes the critical role of sleep as the foundation of good health. He suggests that in order to achieve and sustain optimal well-being, one must prioritize restful sleep, as it serves as a creative force or 'muse' that allows for vitality and overall health to flourish.
In practice
During a wellness seminar, one might say, 'As Ralph Waldo Emerson wisely stated, health is the first muse, and sleep is the condition to produce it.'
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?
...There's a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them.
Before I started chemotherapy treatments, I wrote down the best advice from doctors, family, friends, books, and survivors and created an 'Owner's Manual' to help me take care of myself. It would remind me that cancer is doable.
If you want to prevent abortions, you make sure everyone has health care, a high school education and birth control. Not the exact opposite.
I'm not asking any of you to make drastic changes to every single one of your recipes or to totally change the way you do business. But what I am asking is that you consider reformulating your menu in pragmatic and incremental ways to create healthier versions of the foods that we all love.
You should not actually stay in bed for very long awake, because your brain is this remarkably associative device, and it quickly learns that the bed is about being awake. So you should go to another room - a room that's dim. Just read a book - no screens, no phones - and, only when you're sleepy, return to the bed.
Sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together.
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