There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.
Interpretation
Drinking can isolate individuals from society and reality.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson highlights the detrimental effects of alcohol consumption, suggesting that it not only alienates individuals from social interactions but also ultimately distances them from the broader experiences of life. It serves as a cautionary observation about the potential for addiction and the longing for escapism that drinking can offer, which may lead to a complete withdrawal from both society and the essence of existence.
In practice
This quote could be referenced in a discussion about the social impacts of alcohol at a community health seminar.
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?
One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen.
The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free is the task.
It's in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It's not in happiness. It's not in impulsive pleasure.
L.A. runs on optimism, enthusiasm and flattery. I think you can go a little bit crazy. I've heard people say there's a limit to the number of years you can stay in this city without going slightly mad. It's just too damn sunny in every dimension - weather-wise, socially and professionally.
There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death -those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement- been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.
Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever.
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