If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.
Interpretation
Language distinguishes humans from animals, enabling complex communication and thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote emphasizes the importance of language in human development. Without the ability to articulate thoughts and ideas, humanity would remain primitive, lacking the sophisticated communication that advances culture, knowledge, and civilization. Language is not just a tool for communication; it is a defining characteristic of what it means to be human.
In practice
In a speech about education, one might quote this to highlight the role of language in learning.
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?
History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but it stops at the door of honest narrative.
Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.
It is easy to get used to the morning news, habituated. But don't. The morning news is yours to alter.
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