My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.
Interpretation
Emerson emphasizes the importance of living a life that is distinctive and meaningful, encompassing struggles and triumphs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote suggests that a truly fulfilling life is one that embraces uniqueness and purpose. He likens life to various forms of significance, such as an alms for others, a battle against challenges, a conquest of personal goals, and a medicine for the soul, indicating that life should be approached with a blend of generosity, struggle, achievement, and healing.
In practice
This quote can inspire students to pursue their passions distinctly.
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?
Because reading is one of the joys of life, and once you begin, you can't stop, and you've got so many stories to look forward to.
I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.
If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?
There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.
Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.
My life is a blessing every day that I get up. God saved my feet. How am I not going to use them?
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