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?
Whereever you are, you are one with the clouds and one with the sun and the stars you see. You are one with everything. That is more true than I can say, and more true than you can hear.
We know nothing at all. All our knowledge is but the knowledge of schoolchildren. The real nature of things we shall never know.
One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life.
...mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics. Every other science, even logic, especially in its early stages, is in danger of evaporating into airy nothingness, degenerating, as the Germans say, into an arachnoid film, spun from the stuff that dreams are made of. There is no such danger for pure mathematics; for that is precisely what mathematics ought to be.
The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.
Some African leaders actually dare to suggest that democracy is a concept alien to traditional African society. This is one of the most impudent political blasphemies I can think of.
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