Guard your own spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds.
Interpretation
Cherish and make the most of your free time, as it holds great value.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson highlights the importance of recognizing the value of our spare moments, suggesting that they are precious and can lead to growth and personal fulfillment when utilized wisely. Just as uncut diamonds have potential that is not immediately apparent, so too do our moments of free time possess the opportunity for creativity, reflection, and self-improvement.
In practice
In a motivational speech about productivity, one could emphasize the importance of guarding spare moments.
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?
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
There is more beauty in truth, even if it is a dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.
How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?
With celestial sight, trials impossible to change become possible to endure.
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.
As from a large heap of flowers many garlands and wreaths are made, so by a mortal in this life there is much good work to be done.
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