I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Interpretation
The speaker values personal knowledge and understanding over citing others.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson expresses a disdain for mere quotations and emphasizes the importance of original thought and personal knowledge. Emerson advocates for self-discovery and encourages individuals to rely on their own understanding instead of simply repeating the words of others.
In practice
During a philosophy class discussion on the value of original thought.
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?
Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me--
I believe that very much of current Arminianism is simply ignorance of gospel doctrine; and if people began to study their Bibles, and to take the Word of God as they find it, they must inevitably, if believers, rise up to rejoice in the doctrines of grace.
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.
Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, political, or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies.
Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry.
I became aware of how the world is and how the white establishment plays black people against each other.
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