Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
Interpretation
A single powerful word can convey profound meaning, making lengthy explanations unnecessary.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson highlights the power of simplicity and the impact that a single, well-chosen word can have in expressing complex ideas. It suggests that often, the essence of a thought can be captured succinctly without the need for extensive elaboration, emphasizing the importance of clarity and precision in communication.
In practice
In a speech about effective communication, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of clarity.
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?
Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity.
The American elite is almost beyond redemption. . . . Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush--sophistry washed down with Chardonnay. The ordinary citizens, thank goodness, still adhere to absolutes.... It is they who have saved the republic from creeping degradation while their 'betters' were derelict.
A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships
If God forbade drinking, would He have made wine so good?
Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.
... at the beginning of the human race the woman was made of a rib taken from the side of the man while he slept; for it seemed fit that even then Christ and His Church should be foreshadowed in this event. For that sleep of the man was the death of Christ, whose side, as He hung lifeless upon the Cross, was pierced with a spear, and there flowed from it blood and water, and these we know to be the sacraments by which the Church is built up.
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