A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.
Interpretation
Our perception of our own flaws influences how others perceive us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that the way we view and treat our personal imperfections affects the significance they hold in the eyes of others. When an individual downplays their defects, others are likely to adopt a similar attitude, reflecting the importance we attribute to our own challenges in their perceptions.
In practice
In a motivational speech about self-acceptance.
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?
Fling me across the fabric of time and the seas of space. Make me nothing and from nothing-everything.
Time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible, without it nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.
You go on being reincarnated until you reach the actual Truth. Heaven and Hell are just a state of mind. We are all here to become Christ-like. The actual world is an illusion.
Another strange notion pervading whole peoples is that the State has money of its own; and nowhere is this absurdity more firmly fixed than in America. The State has no money. It produces nothing. It existence is purely parasitic, maintained by taxation; that is to say, by forced levies on the production of others. 'Government money,' of which one hears so much nowadays, does not exist; there is no such thing.
The Resurrection miracle is nothing to you and me if it is only an event of eighteen centuries bygone. Unless we can live the immortal life - unless we can receive God to his own home in these hearts of ours - the texts are nothing to us unless these daily lives illustrate them.
I don't think much new ever happens. Most of us spend our days the same way people spent their days in the year 1000: walking around smiling, trying to earn enough to eat, while neurotically doing these little self-proofs in our head about how much better we are than these other slobs, while simultaneously, in another part of our brain, secretly feeling woefully inadequate to these smarter, more beautiful people.
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