Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.
Interpretation
Cherish and utilize your free time wisely, as it holds great potential.
This quote emphasizes the importance of how we choose to spend our spare moments. Ralph Waldo Emerson compares spare time to uncut diamonds that, if neglected, remain worthless. However, if we invest time in meaningful activities, those moments can transform into valuable experiences that enhance our lives.
In practice
During a motivational speech about time management, this quote highlights the importance of seizing every moment.
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?
Be more interested in character than reputation
Age to me means nothing. I can't get old; I'm working. I was old when I was twenty-one and out of work. As long as you're working, you stay young. When I'm in front of an audience, all that love and vitality sweeps over me and I forget my age.
If a great thing can be done, it can be done easily, but this ease is like the of ease of a tree blossoming after long years of gathering strength.
Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn't control you--you should control them.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.