For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?
Interpretation
The quote suggests that all efforts in life are meaningless without freedom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote emphasizes the fundamental importance of freedom in our lives. It argues that regardless of the material accomplishments we achieve, such as success in work or life, their true value is diminished if we do not possess the freedom to enjoy and utilize them. Thus, freedom is portrayed as an essential condition for a life well-lived.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech discussing the importance of civil rights.
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 repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of it is crud.
Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.
Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.
Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is wiser not to stir them.
It seems entirely possible to me that horrible things can be going on without us becoming horrible people.
From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.
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