Let not a man guard his dignity, but let his dignity guard him.
Interpretation
True dignity comes from within and should protect us rather than be something we need to defend.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that instead of striving to maintain our dignity as an external facade, we should allow our inherent dignity to serve as an internal strength and guide. It emphasizes that genuine self-worth is not something to be displayed or defended at all costs but rather a natural state that can protect and define our character.
In practice
In a motivational speech to young adults about personal development and self-respect.
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?
Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing.
I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.
When we disclaim praise, it is only showing our desire to be praised a second time.
Now, God be praised, that to believing souls gives light in darkness, comfort in despair.
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
I have learned things from the game. Much of my knowledge of locations in Britain and Europe comes not from school, but from away games or the sports pages, and hooliganism has given me both a taste for sociology and a degree of fieldwork experience. I have learned the value of investing time and emotion in things I cannot control, and of belonging to a community whose aspirations I share completely and uncritically.
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