I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity.
Interpretation
Emerson emphasizes the immense value of personal integrity.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson expresses the deep reverence he has for individual integrity, suggesting that no words can adequately capture its significance. He highlights the sacredness of maintaining one's values and honesty in a world that may often challenge or undermine them.
In practice
In a speech about personal values, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of integrity.
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 the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies ... are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention ... The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.
Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.
The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.
Whatever is not stone is light
And that's why people read comics, to get away from the way life works, which is quite cruel and unheroic and ends in death.
Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.
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