Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
Interpretation
Society often pressures individuals to conform rather than embrace their unique qualities.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that society creates an environment where individuality and self-reliance are stifled in favor of conformity. Emerson emphasizes that this societal conspiracy undermines the essence of manhood and the value of true creativity and reality, promoting a preference for established names and customs over genuine self-expression and originality.
In practice
During a speech about personal growth, you might use this quote to emphasize the importance of staying true to oneself.
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?
Environmental degradation is an iatrogenic disease induced by economic physicians who treat the basic malady of unlimited wants by prescribing unlimited growth.... Yet one certainly does not cure a treatment-induced disease by increasing the treatment dosage.
I stood staring, not as yet realising that this was death leaping from man to man in that little distant crowd.
The most important thing to me is, how, in the process of learning how to use my body, can I come to understand myself ?
Synergy is the highest activity of life; it creates new untapped alternatives; it values and exploits the mental, emotional, and psychological differences between people.
If this were a fantasy world, there would be ten of me and we would each be doing what we wanted to do.
When those deserving of Paradise would enter Paradise, the Blessed and the Exalted would ask: Do you wish Me to give you anything more? They would say: Hast Thou not brightened our faces? Hast Thou not made us enter Paradise and saved us from Fire? He would lift the veil, and of things given to them nothing would be dearer to them than the sight of their Lord, the Mighty and the Glorious.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.