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?
They that apply themselves to trifling matters commonly become incapable of great ones.
You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you.
Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.
Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.
Never give a sword to a man who can't dance.
We all make mistakes, we all have fears, and we all have weaknesses. Behind all that is our essential self. When our essential self has made contact with another, the light is dazzling and would fill the universe. The challenge of enchantment is to remain faithful to that light, to believe in it when it is not so apparent. Then that light becomes an incandescent glow and it wraps itself around everything.
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