Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.
Interpretation
Create your own guide to life by choosing meaningful words and lessons from your experiences.
Ralph Waldo Emerson encourages individuals to curate their own personal philosophy or belief system by identifying and collecting significant insights and truths that resonate deeply with them. This metaphorical 'Bible' serves as a personal testament of wisdom gleaned from various readings and experiences, emphasizing the importance of self-discovery and individual interpretation of knowledge.
In practice
During a personal development workshop, you could share this quote to encourage participants to reflect on their own guiding principles.
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?
Rather than going after our walls and barriers with a sledgehammer, we pay attention to them. With gentleness and honesty, we move closer to those walls. We touch them and smell them and get to know them well. We begin a process of acknowledging our aversions and our cravings. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to build the walls: What are the stories I tell myself? What repels me and what attracts me? We start to get curious about whatβs going on.
Becoming the beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the ordinariness of what I am, in fact, thinking of, talking about and doing from hour to hour.
Words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free.
Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant loosing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.
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