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?
In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.
Vision without execution is delusion.
Don't wish me happiness - I don't expect to be happy it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor - I will need them all.
[T]he more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer . . . [taking] away from before their eyes the greatest of all inducements to industry, frugality, and sobriety, by giving them a dependence of somewhat else than a careful accumulation during youth and health for support in age and sickness.
Attitude lies somewhere between emotion and logic. It's that curious mix of optimism and determination that enables you to maintain a positive outlook and to continue plodding in the face of the most adverse circumstances.
This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation.
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