The basis of good manners is self-reliance.
Interpretation
Good manners stem from an individual's confidence in themselves.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that true good manners are not merely about following social conventions, but rather about having a strong sense of self-reliance. When individuals believe in their own worth and capabilities, they naturally exhibit respectful behavior towards others, indicating that self-assuredness fosters genuine courtesy and respect in social interactions.
In practice
During a speech about personal development at a leadership conference.
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 man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.
I believe God takes the things in our lives - family, background, education - and uses them as part of his calling. It might not be to become a pastor. But I don't think God wastes anything.
I think we all want to know that if our lives don't turn out the way we imagine, there's still a purpose.
The entire universe - for one thing - only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality.
Human nature is so constituted, that all see and judge better in the affairs of other men than in their own.
You don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies.
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