Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread.
Interpretation
Contributing meaningfully to society will lead to your own fulfillment and support.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the importance of being valuable and indispensable in the world. When you make yourself essential by offering solutions, skills, or support, society will recognize your efforts and, in return, provide for your needs, symbolized here by 'bread'. It highlights a reciprocal relationship between selflessness and personal gain.
In practice
In a motivational speech about finding purpose in life, you could use this quote to inspire the audience.
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?
Day turned to night, His friends scattered and death thought it had won. But heaven just started counting to three
As we speak cruel time is fleeing. Seize the day, believing as little as possible in tomorrow.
An intense anticipation itself transforms possibility into reality; our desires being often but precursors of the things which we are capable of performing.
Direction, not intention determines your destination.
Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world.
One of the main techniques I used was focusing on the goal and visualising myself competing in the race before the race started.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.