A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue.
Interpretation
True beauty is revealed when one embraces virtue with an open heart and mind.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that the most profound and enchanting beauty emerges when an individual cultivates a deep appreciation for virtue. It implies that the opening of our hearts and minds to virtuous principles allows us to perceive a beauty that transcends the superficial, enriching our experience of life and the world around us.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a discussion on the importance of moral values in personal growth.
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?
The older I get, the more I understand that the only way to say valuable things is to lose your fear of being correct.
I never waste time looking back.
When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.
He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it
No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.
Always there should be a little mistake here and there - I am for it. The people who don't do mistakes are cold like ice. It takes risk to make a mistake. If you don't take risk, you are boring.
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