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 believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.
This whole universe is but a drop _x000D_ of His Beauty!
To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent.
If a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feelings. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat; what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois.
Man is man because he is free to operate within a framework of his destiny. He is free to deliberate, to make decisions, and to choose between alternatives. He is distinguished from animals by his freedom to do evil or to do good and to walk the high road of beauty or tread the low road of ugly degeneracy.
We are not just visitors on this planet, it belongs to us just as we belong to her, its past is ours, so is its future.
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