Religion is as effectively destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.
Interpretation
Bigotry and indifference both undermine the core values of religion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote emphasizes that religion can be harmed not only through outright intolerance and prejudice but also through apathy and lack of engagement. Both bigotry, which breeds divisiveness and conflict, and indifference, which leads to neglect and disconnection, serve to weaken the spiritual and communal bonds that religion can foster among people.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of understanding and accepting different faiths.
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?
Man is to man either a god or a wolf.
We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.
I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.
It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have - otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.
I cry very easily. It can be a movie, a phone conversation, a sunset - tears are words waiting to be written.
Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.
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