If you would serve your brother it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back your words when you find that prudent people do not commend you. Be true to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age.
Interpretation
Stay true to your values and actions, regardless of others' opinions.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the importance of remaining authentic to oneself and one's actions, even when faced with criticism or lack of approval from others. He encourages individuals to embrace their unique contributions and to find satisfaction in their actions, especially when those actions may deviate from societal norms and expectations, helping to break the monotony of conformity.
In practice
During a motivational speech about embracing one's uniqueness.
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?
The cost of a loaf is a simple thing, and so a loaf is often sought, but some things are past valuing: laughter, land, and love are never bought.
The evils that arise to us from the structure of the material universe are neither trivial nor few, yet the history of political society sufficiently shows that man is, of all other beings, the most formidable enemy to man.
Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
Remarkably, governments are beginning to embrace the idea that nothing enhances democracy more than giving voice and information to everybody in the country. Why not open their books if they have nothing to hide?
Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.
There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
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