One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom anpther's folly.
Interpretation
Perceptions of justice, beauty, and wisdom can vary greatly between individuals.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the subjective nature of human values and judgments. It suggests that what one person considers just, beautiful, or wise can be seen as unjust, ugly, or foolish by another, highlighting the complexity of human perspectives and the inherent relativism in our understanding of morality and aesthetics.
In practice
In a debate about justice, this quote could highlight the different interpretations of fairness.
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?
What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language.
As far back as I can remember I have unconsciously referred to the experiences of a previous state of existence.
The portion we see of human beings is very small: their formats and faces, voices and words.... beyond these, like an immense dark continent, lies all that has made them.
Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.
It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.
The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man's real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would only be an insect crawling among the ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe.
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