Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.
Interpretation
Constructive criticism should be positive and helpful rather than negative and destructive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the importance of delivering criticism in a constructive manner. Instead of being harsh or unproductive, criticism should aim to guide and inspire individuals towards growth, much like a gentle south wind that nurtures rather than an east wind that brings harshness.
In practice
In a team meeting when discussing performance feedback.
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?
By criticizing, we do not make lasting changes and often incur resentment.
Of all the traps and pitfalls in life, self-disesteem is the deadliest, and the hardest to overcome: for it is a pit designed and dug by our own hands, summed up in the phrase, 'It's no use - I can't do it.'
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise.
None of us is perfect. There was only one perfect man who ever walked the earth, and He was the Son of God. We all have weaknesses and I guess we all make mistakes and will make mistakes in the future, but look for the virtues, the strengths, the goodness in those with whom you labor, and draw those characteristics into your own lives and make them a part of yourselves, and you will be the richer for it all the days that you live.
When a man is perfect, he sees perfection in others. When he sees imperfection, it is his own mind projecting itself.
Start the practice of self-control with some penance; begin with fasting.
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