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?
A consciousness of wrongdoing is the first step to salvation...you have to catch yourself doing it before you can correct it.
Bad evangelism says: I'm right, you're wrong, and I would love to tell you about it
War is very uncertain in its results, and often when affairs look most desperate they suddenly assume a more hopeful state.
If the awareness of our limitations begins to limit or to dim our value consciousness as well—as happens, for instance, in old age with regard to the values of youth—then we have already started the movement of devaluation which will end with the defamation of the world and all its values. Only a timely act of resignation can deliver us from this tendency toward self-delusion.
I see with greater and greater clearness that consistent Christianity is the easiest Christianity to defend
A lawyer is either a social engineer or he is a parasite on society.
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