Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows.
Interpretation
Embrace and engage with the world around you, experiencing both its joys and struggles.
In this quote, Emerson encourages individuals to actively participate in life by loving the world around them. He emphasizes the importance of engaging with both the happiness and challenges that come with being part of a community, suggesting that true fulfillment comes from connecting with others and recognizing the shared human experience.
In practice
In a motivational speech about community service, this quote can inspire action.
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 has been my face. It's got older still, or course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed, as some with fine feature have done. It's kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste.
I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.
Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.
My whole life has been one big improvisation.
I would like to travel light on this journey of life, to get rid of the encumbrances I acquire each day.
If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.
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