One man pins me to the wall, while with another I walk among the stars
Interpretation
The quote contrasts the limitations imposed by others with the freedom and inspiration one can find in certain relationships.
Ralph Waldo Emerson reflects on the duality of human experience, where a negative relationship can confine and restrict one's potential, symbolized by being pinned to a wall, while a positive and uplifting relationship allows for exploration and joy, represented by walking among the stars. It highlights the impact that different individuals can have on our emotional and psychological states, emphasizing the importance of nurturing those connections that elevate us.
In practice
During a motivational speech about the value of supportive friendships.
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?
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
Power corrupts, and there is nothing more corrupting than power exercised in secret.
It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come today.
To picture world history as advancing smoothly and steadily without sometimes taking gigantic strides backward is undialectical, unscientific and theoretically wrong.
Tradition is the illusion of permanance.
With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.
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