Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.
Interpretation
Life's hardships keep us grounded in reality.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that challenges such as poverty, famine, and disease serve as reminders of our reality. These difficulties effectively act as guides, urging us to maintain practical and common-sense approaches to life, as they can expose our vulnerabilities and priorities.
In practice
In a motivational speech about resilience during tough times.
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?
Prescribing hard work for the soft, or easy work for the hardy, is generally nonsense. What is always needed in any aim is right effort, right time, right people, right materials.
People make a lot of effort not to remember, not to accept their immense magical potential.
This is the key to life: the ability to reflect, the ability to know yourself, the ability to pause for a second before reacting automatically. If you can truly know yourself, you will begin the journey of transformation.
I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.
Greatness of soul consists not so much in soaring high and in pressing forward, as in knowing how to adapt and limit oneself.
If you ask him: "What is silence?" he will answer, "It is the Great Mystery! The holy silence is His voice!" If you ask: "What are the fruits of silence?" he will say: "They are self-control, true courage or endurance, patience, dignity, and reverence. Silence is the cornerstone of character."
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