The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.
Interpretation
Good and bad are defined by their effects on others, either helping or hurting them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that the concepts of good and bad are fundamentally about their impact on people. To discern whether an action is virtuous or harmful, we should evaluate whether it promotes well-being and assistance or causes pain and suffering.
In practice
In a debate on ethics, this quote can illustrate the importance of the consequences of actions.
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?
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
Death is a vast mystery, but there are two things we can say about it: It is absolutely certain that we will die, and it is uncertain when or how we will die. The only surety we have, then, is this uncertainty about the hour of our death, which we seize on as the excuse to postpone facing death directly. We are like children who cover their eyes in a game of hide and seek and think that no one can see them.
When Ford sells a car, a dealer isn't allowed to take out the engine and put a different one in. When a newsstand sells the Washington Post, no one can go to the newsstand and pay them to rip out the classified section and put their own classified section in - if they could, they would do so.
There are two ways to wash the dishes. One way is to wash them to get them clean. The other way is to wash them in order to wash the dishes.
When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
Angels speak. They appear and reappear. They feel with apt sense of emotion. While Angels may become visible by choice, our eyes are not conducted to see them ordinarily any more than we can see the dimensions of a nuclear field, the structure of atoms, or the electricity that flows through copper wiring.
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