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?
Half of your power lies in your sameness with others. The other half lies in your uniqueness.
Those who tread among serpents, and along a tortuous path, must use the cunning of the serpent.
In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me.
If you determine your course With force or speed, You miss the way of the dharma. Quietly consider What is right and what is wrong. Receiving all opinions equally, Without haste, wisely, Observe the dharma.
It turns out that unexplained positivity lasts longer than positivity we analyze until we fully understand it.
I used to be one of those students who needed to see something bigger, and God brought people into my life who gave me a bigger vision than the circumstances that surrounded me.
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