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?
Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.
The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.
Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you?
A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory.
A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.
If there is only empty space, with no suns nor planets in it, then space loses its substantiality.
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