No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
Interpretation
Personal character is fundamental, and external circumstances cannot fix flaws within ourselves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes that true character comes from within and that changing external circumstances will not mend inherent personal flaws. This quote serves as a reminder that self-improvement requires inner work rather than relying on outside conditions or situations to change for the better.
In practice
A motivational speaker might use this quote to highlight the importance of inner strength at a conference.
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?
There are no circumstances imaginable, not even victory, under which the proletariat should give up its possession of arms.
I enjoyed having a reputation as being wild, but these days I try not to worry about what people think in the privacy of their own brain or what they write in the bizarre publicity of their own newspapers, because all of those things are meaningless.
Ser compreendido Γ© prostituir-se.
If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that.
In whatever man does without God, he must fail miserably, or succeed more miserably.
Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.
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