Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve anyone; it must husband its resources to live. But health or fullness answers its own ends, and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men's necessities.
Interpretation
Health benefits not only ourselves but also those around us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote reflects on the idea that sickness is a burden that limits one's ability to help others, as it consumes one's energy and resources. In contrast, good health allows an individual to contribute positively to the community, enabling them to extend their capabilities and generosity beyond their own needs, thereby enriching the lives of others.
In practice
In a speech about community health initiatives, this quote could emphasize the importance of supporting healthy lifestyles.
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?
Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.
In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty.
We now eat at the end of a very long and opaque food chain. Food comes to us ready-made in packages that obscure as much information as they reveal.
We've established the most enormous medical entity ever conceived... and people are sicker than ever. We cure nothing! We heal nothing!
What would you do, sir, if terrorists were killing 45,000 people every year in this country? Well, the current health care system, the insurance companies, and those who support them are doing just that. [...] Because they die individually because of disease and not disaster, [radio host] Neal Boortz and all those who ape him approve this. Forty five thousand a year in America. Remind me again, who are the terrorists?
People don't eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain.
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