Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.
Interpretation
Be generous and kind, but stand firm and defend your rights when necessary.
Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the importance of being generous and benevolent like the sun and the sea, which provide for others without expectation. However, he also stresses that one must be ready to fiercely defend their own rights if they are threatened, illustrating the balance between kindness and self-assertion.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of compassion and personal rights.
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?
A man is not old as long as he is seeking something.
Progress depends on our brain. The most important part of our brain, that which is neocortical, must be used to help others and not just to make discoveries.
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Do not despair if the answers don't come immediately. Some answers are only revealed with the passage of time.
The only antidote to dangerous ideas is strong alternatives vigorously advocated.
Aspire not to have more, but to be more.
How marvelous, wide and broad is my Inheritance! Time is my property, my estate is time.
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