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?
The price of excellence is discipline. The cost of mediocrity is disappointment.
Inside every seventy-year-old is a thirty-five-year-old asking, 'What happened?
Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.
Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen.
What could be worse than being born without sight? Being born with sight and no vision.
You are old Father William,' the young man said, 'and your hair has become very white; and yet you incessantly stand on your head-do you think, at your age, it is right?
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