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 essence of globalization is a subordination of human rights, of labor rights, consumer, environmental rights, democracy rights, to the imperatives of global trade and investment.
I think all things are political... How women are portrayed - that's a big thing for me. What is this role trying to say about women? Is this woman weak or victimised, and, if so, do we get to understand why?
There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.
The Constitution overrides a statute, but a statute, if consistent with the Constitution, overrides the law of judges. In this sense, judge-made law is secondary and subordinate to the law that is made by legislators.
We must, therefore, be here as strangers and pilgrims, that we may plainly declare that we seek a city above.
I remember the initial genesis quite clearly. My interest in dreams comes from this notion of realizing that when you dream you create the world that you are perceiving, and I thought that feedback loop was pretty amazing.
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