Many might go to Heaven with half the labor they go to hell.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that people often expend more effort in negative pursuits than in seeking positive or virtuous outcomes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote reflects on the notion that individuals frequently invest significant energy and determination in actions that lead to negative consequences, such as moral failure or vice, while achieving positive outcomes, such as spiritual enlightenment or virtue, might require far less effort. It challenges us to reconsider how we allocate our efforts and encourages a shift toward pursuing better and more fulfilling goals in life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about career choices.
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?
I was trained to be an actor, not a star. I was trained to play roles, not to deal with fame and agents and lawyers and the press.
I like people that define their own values. I am much more interested in somebody who has their own definition of what they value, their own definition of what success is, their own definition of what love is.
There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.
Morality is of the highest importance - but for us, not for God.
The history of our spiritual life is a continuing search for the unity between ourselves and the world. Religion, art, and science follow, one and all, this aim.
The great objects which presented themselves [to the Constitutional Convention] ... formed a task more difficult than can be well conceived by those who were not concerned in the execution of it. Adding to these considerations the natural diversity of human opinions on all new and complicated subjects, it is impossible to consider the degree of concord which ultimately prevailed as less than a miracle.
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