The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
Interpretation
Boasting about one's integrity often reveals insecurities and hidden flaws.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that those who overly emphasize their honor or principles may actually be compensating for a lack of true integrity. Instead of gaining respect, their loud claims lead others to be skeptical and alert to their possible dishonesty, as symbolized by the act of counting spoons—monitoring what cannot be taken for granted.
In practice
This quote can be used during a discussion on integrity in leadership.
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?
Some of the greatest uprisings and consequent civil wars in Mexico have centered squarely on the ownership of land.
If principles can become dated, they're not principles.
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
We want to achieve a new and better order of society: in this new and better society there must be neither rich nor poor; all will have to work. Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people. This new and better society is called socialist society.
I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one's nature.
We believe what we see.’...What do you do when you’re in the dark?
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