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?
Look past your thoughts, so you may drink the pure nectar of This Moment.
The doctrine of foods is of great ethical and political significance. Food becomes blood, blood becomes heart and brain, thoughts and mind stuff. Human fare is the foundation of human culture and thought. Would you improve a nation? Give it, instead of declamations against sin, better food. Man is what he eats [Der Mensch ist, was er isst].
Once we are self-aware, we must choose purposes and principles to live by; otherwise the vacuum will be filled, and we will lose our self-awareness and become like groveling animals who live primarily for survival and propagation. People who exist on that level aren't living; they are "being lived".
My continent knows more about me than I do myself.
Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy wind, making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him.
If you break your finger, that's on you, right? But if you get a chronic illness, if you get a serious illness or life-threatening illness, that's something I think we should all share the cost in because we all face the same unknowns and the same risks.
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