Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.
Interpretation
People often become angry when their preferences are challenged.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote reflects the idea that individuals are deeply connected to their personal tastes and preferences. When these are questioned or criticized, they can react strongly, often with anger. This suggests that our tastes are not just superficial choices but are tied to our identity and self-worth, highlighting the importance of understanding and respecting differing opinions.
In practice
This quote can be used during a debate about personal preferences in art or literature.
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?
Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.
The brightest saint is the man who has the most heart-searching sense of his own sinfulness, and the liveliest sense of his own complete acceptance in Christ.
Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry.
Every man must have the right fearlessly to think independently and express his opinion about what he knows, what he has personally thought about and experienced, and not merely to express with slightly different variations the opinion which has been inculcated in him.
Between here and heaven, every minute that the Christian lives will be a minute of grace.
Actions are but lifeless forms whose soul is the secret of sincerity in them
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