Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?
Interpretation
A life with fewer desires leads to greater self-sufficiency and elegance.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that true elegance comes from simplicity and self-sufficiency. By minimizing our wants and needs, we can cultivate a more refined existence, free from the distractions and complications that arise from excessive desires. In essence, it promotes the idea that personal fulfillment and grace come from within, rather than from external possessions or validations.
In practice
In a speech focusing on minimalism and self-sufficiency.
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 life of a sannyasin should be a life of no expectations. And then every moment is such a bliss, such a benediction, because whatsoever God gives is so much. Then you always feel grateful. But your desires are so much that whatsoever God gives always looks so little; and you feel frustrated, and you feel complaints, and you cannot feel grateful. And without gratitude, there is no possibility of prayer arising in your heart. Gratitude is prayer.
Equal protection under the law - for race, religion, gender or sexual orientation - should not be subject to the most popular sentiments of the day.
Destiny is a name often given in retrospect to choices that had dramatic consequences.
Only faith in Christ gives rise to a culture contrary to egotism and death.
An individual, in promoting his own interest, may injure the public interest; a nation, in promoting the general welfare, may check the interest of a part of its members.
A stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea.
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