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?
Atticus, he was real nice." "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.
They say you can't study Kabbalah until you are at least 40 years old. You know why? You have to have experienced at least one generation making the same mistakes as the previous one.
You learn to know a pilot in a storm.
Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.
Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.
Appear to know only this--never to fail nor fall.
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