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?
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
But they know about us, they know, the four corners, and the chairs nearby us. Discerning shadows also know, and even the table keeps quiet.
Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence.
That's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.
Our best built certainties are but sand-houses and subject to damage from any wind of doubt that blows
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