Many might go to Heaven with half the labor they go to hell.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that people often expend more effort in negative pursuits than in seeking positive or virtuous outcomes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote reflects on the notion that individuals frequently invest significant energy and determination in actions that lead to negative consequences, such as moral failure or vice, while achieving positive outcomes, such as spiritual enlightenment or virtue, might require far less effort. It challenges us to reconsider how we allocate our efforts and encourages a shift toward pursuing better and more fulfilling goals in life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about career choices.
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 self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.
So the idea that there is nothing essential, in the sense that there are no human universals, is dogma. Ask most anyone who is going to be shot at dawn.
Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.
I wish we didn't live in a world where buying and selling things seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.
What a strange thing man is; and what a stranger thing woman.
I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.
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