Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold it's great proportions.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of shaping one's life according to personal ideals and visions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson encourages individuals to take an active role in shaping their own realities. By aligning your actions and thoughts with your true ideals, you can bring about significant changes and achieve greatness in your life. This idea speaks to the power of intention and the ability to cultivate a fulfilling existence through personal conviction and creativity.
In practice
This quote can be a great opener at a motivational workshop.
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?
It is... easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.
The provisions we have made [for our government] are such as please ourselves; they answer the substantial purposes of government and of justice, and other purposes than these should not be answered.
Celebrity is a national drama whose characters' parts and plots are written by the tabloids, gossip columnists, websites and interactive buttons. The famous don't actually have to turn up to their own lives at all.
His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.
What a fool I was! and yet, in the sight of angels, are we any wiser as we grow older? It seems to me, only, that our illusions change as we go on; but, still, we are madmen all the same.
Men might as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their bread.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.