For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?
Interpretation
The quote suggests that all efforts in life are meaningless without freedom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote emphasizes the fundamental importance of freedom in our lives. It argues that regardless of the material accomplishments we achieve, such as success in work or life, their true value is diminished if we do not possess the freedom to enjoy and utilize them. Thus, freedom is portrayed as an essential condition for a life well-lived.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech discussing the importance of civil rights.
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?
The future will erase everything--there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.
I always thought I was Jeanne d'Arc and Bonaparte. How little one knows oneself.
Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
The first reaction to truth is hatred.
It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark.
A goodly portly man, i' faith, and a corpulent; of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage; and, as I think, his age some fifty, or, by'r Lady, inclining to threescore; and now I remember me, his name is Falstaff.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.