Women see better than men. Men see lazily, if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that women have a more attentive and perceptive way of seeing the world compared to men, who may only engage when action is required.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote reflects on the different ways men and women perceive their surroundings. He suggests that women possess a natural clarity of vision that allows them to observe without the need for immediate action, while men may be more passive or less engaged in their observations unless they have a specific purpose in mind. This highlights a contrast in attentiveness and perception between the genders, implying a depth to women's observational faculties that may often go unrecognized.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about gender differences in communication styles.
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?
Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part; beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.
This book was not written because I wanted to offer a supreme model to the man who struggles; I wanted to show him that he must not fear pain, temptation or death - because all three can be conquered, all three have already been conquered. Christ suffered pain, and since then pain has been sanctified. Temptation fought until the very last moment to lead him astray, and Temptation was defeated. Christ died on the Cross, and at that instant death was vanquished forever.
For, dear me, why abandon a belief, Merely because it ceases to be true, Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt, It will turn true again, for so it goes.
The only boundaries we have are in form. There are no obstacles in thought.
Golden fetters are no less galling to a self-respecting man that iron ones; the sting lies in the fetters, not in the metal.
Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it. Dictated the rhythm with which their bodies answered each other. As though they already knew that for each tremor of pleasure they would pay with an equal measure of pain. As though they knew that how far they went would be measured against how far they would be taken.
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