I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One's enough.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of individuality and the harm of imposing one's beliefs on others.
Ralph Waldo Emerson expresses his concern about how parents or authority figures often impose their own opinions and lifestyles on younger generations, which can hinder their ability to develop their own identities. He advocates for allowing individuals to embrace their uniqueness and live authentically, suggesting that one person's perspective is sufficient and that diversity in thought and behavior is valuable.
In practice
In a motivational speech about embracing one's true self.
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?
She always imagined that evil played out on a large canvas- wars, concentration camps, gas chambers, the partitioning of nations. Now she realized that evil had a domestic side, and its very banality protected it from exposure.
Dead girl walking” the boys say in the halls. “Tell us your secrets” the girls whisper, one toilet to another. "I am that girl. I am the spaces between my thighs, daylight shinning through. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.
So she was considering in her own mind...whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up & picking the daisies.
Mankind censure injustice fearing that they may be the victims of it, and not because they shrink from committing it.
Mathematics is a logical method. . . . Mathematical propositions express no thoughts. In life it is never a mathematical proposition which we need, but we use mathematical propositions only in order to infer from propositions which do not belong to mathematics to others which equally do not belong to mathematics.
The judge should not be young, he should have learned to know evil, not from his own soul, but from late and long observation of the nature of evil in others.
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