When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; ... he learns his ignorance, is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill.
Interpretation
Adversity can lead to personal growth and self-awareness.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson illustrates the idea that challenges and hardships often serve as important learning experiences. When a person faces adversity, they are given the opportunity to recognize their limitations and overcome the arrogance of thinking they are infallible, ultimately leading to personal development and mastery in their endeavors.
In practice
During a motivational speech about resilience in the face of challenges.
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?
I don't argue with my enemies; I explain to their children.
I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred. I resolved then that I would permit no man, no matter what his color, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
What care I if it be "wild and improbable" and "lacking in literary art"? I refuse to be any longer hampered by such canons of criticism. The one essential thing I demand of a book is that it should interest me. If it does, I forgive it every other fault.
I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator.
Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.
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