People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.
Interpretation
Great talents are common, but those who possess balance and symmetry in their abilities are rare.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote highlights the distinction between mere talent and the harmony that comes from balancing various strengths. While many individuals may have impressive skills or gifts, it is the rare person who not only excels in specific areas but also maintains a sense of balance and overall symmetry in their capabilities and character, leading to a more holistic form of excellence.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal development.
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?
Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
It is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition. It is only when you are constantly inquiring, constantly observing, constantly learning, that you find truth, God, or love.
I'm attracted to subjects who overcome tremendous suffering and learn to cope emotionally with it
OUTCOME, n. A particular type of disappointment . . . . judged by the outcome, the result. This is immortal nonsense; the wisdom of an act is to be juded by the light that the doer had when he performed it.
I have tried to be a man of letters in love with ideas in order to be a wiser and more loving person, hoping to leave the world just a little better than I found it.
Humbleness, forgiveness, clarity and love are the dynamics of freedom. They are the foundations of authentic power.
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