To believe in luck, if it were not a solecism so to use the word believe, is skepticism.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that believing in luck indicates a lack of true skepticism and critical thinking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson articulates that to place faith in luck amounts to a naive stance that lacks skepticism. Instead of relying on chance or external factors, he implies that one should cultivate a mindset grounded in reason and personal agency rather than attributing outcomes to fortune.
In practice
In a motivational speech to encourage self-reliance over reliance on luck.
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?
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
Away with the cant of 'Measures not men!'-the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along.
The Cosmos was not made by gods but always was and is eternal fire.
Heaven and Earth last for ever. Why do Heaven and Earth last for ever? They are unborn, so ever living. The sage stays behind, thus he is ahead. He is detached, thus at one with all. Through selfless action, he attains fulfillment.
To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.
Skepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.
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