Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
Interpretation
A single powerful word can convey profound meaning, making lengthy explanations unnecessary.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson highlights the power of simplicity and the impact that a single, well-chosen word can have in expressing complex ideas. It suggests that often, the essence of a thought can be captured succinctly without the need for extensive elaboration, emphasizing the importance of clarity and precision in communication.
In practice
In a speech about effective communication, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of clarity.
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?
Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.
One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can't refuse to look at how horrible things are.
Soft-brained people, weak-minded, chicken-hearted , cannot find the truth. One has to be free, and as broad as the sky.
Destiny waits alike for the free man as well as for him enslaved by another's might.
To realize the spirit as spirit is practical religion. Everything else is good so far as it leads to this one grand idea. That realization is to be attained by renunciation, by meditation-renunciation of all the senses, cutting the knots, the chains that bind us down to matter.
Who is the most favored of God? He from whom the greatest good comes to His creatures.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.