What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.
Interpretation
Our desires are within reach if we pursue them; avoiding our fears only causes them to persist.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that what we actively search for in life can be attained, while the things we avoid or run away from will continue to linger and affect us. It encourages individuals to confront their challenges and desires, as facing them will lead to fulfillment and resolution, whereas evading them only prolongs their existence in our lives.
In practice
In a motivational speech about facing fears and pursuing dreams.
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 become more than ever convinced that it was not the sword that won a place for Islam in those days. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of Hussein, the scrupulous regard for pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers and his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and in his own mission. These and not the sword carried everything before them and surmounted every obstacle.
Work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons
We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison.
If there's hell below, we're all gonna go.
I have always had trouble recognizing myself in the features of the intellectual playing his political role according to the screenplay that you are familiar with and whose heritage deserves to be questioned.
To lie a little is not possible: he who lies, lies the whole lie.
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