Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals
Interpretation
Life brings many experiences and events that reveal true value beyond superficiality.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that throughout life, people will encounter various situations and 'masks' that serve as metaphors for the roles and facades individuals wear. These experiences can provide profound insights and meaning that are far more valuable than the fleeting joys of superficial celebrations, like carnivals. Ultimately, it highlights the importance of looking beyond appearances to find genuine truths in life.
In practice
In a speech about personal growth, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of recognizing deeper truths in our experiences.
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?
"Uncertainty" is NOT "I don't know." It is "I can't know." "I am uncertain" does not mean "I could be certain."
And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.
There is more evil in the least sin than in the greatest affliction.
When you came into this world you cried, whereas everyone else rejoiced. During your lifetime, work and serve in such a way that when it is time for you to leave this world, you will smile at parting while the world cries for you. Hold this thought and you will always remember to consider others above yourself.
The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.
In my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.
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