I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.
Interpretation
This quote expresses a desire for true freedom rather than just a change of circumstances that still restricts one’s life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson conveys the idea that simply changing one set of limitations for a slightly different and larger set is not enough; instead, he yearns for complete liberation from all constraints. This reflects a deeper philosophical stance on the nature of freedom and the human spirit's quest for true emancipation from societal or self-imposed prisons.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming personal obstacles.
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?
I am joining the more than 200,000 women who will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year... I am inspired by the brave women who have faced this battle before me and grateful for the support of family and friends.
If any man claims the Negro should be content... let him say he would willingly change the color of his skin and go to live in the Negro section of a large city. Then and only then has he a right to such a claim.
It isn't important to come out on top, what matters is to be the one who comes out alive.
If in this supreme test, in face of which the braggart falls silent and every heroic gesture is paralyzed, a man walks straight up to the cause of his fear and is not deterred from doing that which is good -- which ultimately means for the sake of God, and therefore not from ambition or from fear of being taken for a coward -- this man, and he alone, is truly brave.
You’re not leaving me here alone,” I say. Because if he dies, I’ll never go home, not really. I’ll spend the rest of my life in this arena, trying to think my way out.
In my sport, the quick are too often listed among the dead
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