It is not length of life, but depth of life.
Interpretation
Quality of life is more important than the quantity of years lived.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes that the significance of one's life should be measured by the experiences and depth of those experiences rather than merely the number of years one spends living. It suggests that engaging deeply with life, forming meaningful relationships, and pursuing profound experiences lead to a more fulfilling existence.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal growth.
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?
Learn from the past, set vivid, detailed goals for the future, and live in the only moment of time over which you have any control: now.
...I returned to walking up the mountain, and there, in the dim asexual beauty of reddening dawns and skies that firmed to blue, I discovered my real and appropriate strengths.
It is only men who are free, who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worth while.
To accept oneβs past β oneβs history β is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
Example is a bright looking-glass, universal and for all shapes to look into.
Learn to humble yourself, you are but earth and clay.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.