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?
Suicide is not abominable because God prohibits it; God prohibits it because it is abominable.
I am a law only for my kind, I am no law for all.
When resources become skimpy, human beings don't suddenly cooperate to conserve what's left. They fight to the last scrap for possession of a diminishing resource.
The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a vehicle which we board or get out of at random. Our past will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse for as long as we refuse to understand the present and fight for a better future. Only then β but from that moment on β will the burden become a blessing, that is, a weapon in the battle for freedom.
We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart.
The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.
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