What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.
Interpretation
Inner strength and character are more important than past experiences or future possibilities.
This quote emphasizes the significance of our inner qualities over external circumstances. It suggests that the value of who we are internally far surpasses the weight of our past experiences or what may come in the future. Emerson encourages us to look within and recognize our inner strengths as the true measure of our worth and potential.
In practice
During a motivational speech to inspire resilience in students.
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?
Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.
I have lived to see that being seventeen is no protection against becoming seventy, but to know this needs the experience of a lifetime, for no imagination copes with it.
To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.
I'm going to have to be impressed and feel confident in the people I'm handing a book to - or I'm not going to do it. Once you hand it to them, you're out. You have no control over it.
Let me tell so much truth. I want to tell the truth in my work. The truth will lead me to all.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
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