Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.
Interpretation
The true scholar learns from everyone they encounter, recognizing the value in every individual.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson highlights the essence of humility and continuous learning. A true scholar understands that everyone they meet possesses unique knowledge and experiences from which they can learn, suggesting that wisdom is not limited to traditional education but is found in daily interactions with others.
In practice
During a seminar on lifelong learning, I shared Emerson's quote to emphasize the importance of learning from peers.
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?
What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable.
Chance favours a prepared mind.
Those who can take that crabbed tree handsomely upon their back, and fasten it on cannily, shall find it such a burden as wings unto a bird, or sails to a ship.
Ideas are the easy part. I spend a lot of time batting them away, trying to keep them from distracting me from what I actually have to focus on and finish. A lot of times, they are a siren temptress beckoning me with the promise of a much shorter, simpler, more slender novel over the horizon, but of course that's very dangerous.
The beginning point at both conferences must be that everything is a woman's issue. That means racism in a woman's issue, just as is anti-Semitism, Palestinian homelessness, rural development, ecology, the persecution of lesbians, and the exploitative practices of global corporations.
A jealous person is doubly unhappy-over what he has, which is judged inferior, and over which he has not, which is judged superior. Such a person is doubly removed from knowing the true blessing of creation.
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