Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.
Interpretation
Presenting ideas in a tangible form helps others understand and accept them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote emphasizes the importance of articulating arguments in a clear and concrete manner. By transforming abstract ideas into visual or physical representations that can be easily grasped, one can significantly enhance understanding and persuasion, thereby making one's message more impactful and memorable.
In practice
In a presentation to stakeholders, I would use this quote to emphasize the need for clear and visual arguments.
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 English know how to make the best of things. Their so-called muddling through is simply skill at dealing with the inevitable.
During the Arab Spring, I learned all sorts of things from Twitter. I wouldn't necessarily trust that information, but it gave me ideas about questions to ask. You can really learn things from the wisdom of crowds.
Worry - a God, invisible but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse; it takes away the appetite, and turns the hair gray.
The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.
It's not what enters men's mouth that is evil," said the alchemist. It's what comes out of their mouths that is.
If you persist in trying to attain what is never attained (It is Tao's gift), if you persist in making effort to obtain what effort cannot get, if you persist in reasoning about what cannot be understood, you will be destroyed by the very thing you seek. To know when to stop, to know when you can get no further by your own action, this is the right beginning!
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