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 oneβs 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'm a human being I'm not a piece of property. I am not a consignment of goods.
If you have never been called a defiant, incorrigible, impossible woman⦠have faith. There is yet time.
It's tough, acting. You have to walk two lines of a tightrope. There's the all-consuming fear of failure: I'm about to fall flat on my face. There's that and there's also confidence - you have to be confident in order to try things - and they fight each other all the time.
We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home to seek our own lives in peace.
I saw that streak in him when he told me, 'Get the hell out of here or I'll wipe you out., I got the hell out of there, Liston really scared me.
The persecution of Jews in occupied Poland meant that we could see horror emerging gradually in many ways. In 1939, they were forced to wear Jewish stars, and people were herded and shut up into ghettos. Then, in the years '41 and '42 there was plenty of public evidence of pure sadism. With people behaving like pigs, I felt the Jews were being destroyed. I had to help them. There was no choice.
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