Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
Interpretation
Society often pressures individuals to conform rather than embrace their unique qualities.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that society creates an environment where individuality and self-reliance are stifled in favor of conformity. Emerson emphasizes that this societal conspiracy undermines the essence of manhood and the value of true creativity and reality, promoting a preference for established names and customs over genuine self-expression and originality.
In practice
During a speech about personal growth, you might use this quote to emphasize the importance of staying true to oneself.
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?
Freeing oneself from words is liberation.
I still believe that any country understands that if they use nuclear weapons, they will be wiped out of existence. They could be irrational in many ways, but I don't think they're irrational to the point that they're ready to annihilate their own country.
My Brain and My Heart are my Temples. My true Religion is Kindness.
Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomized life as a voracious appetite, and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude of appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance, merciless, planless, endless.
So the unwanting soul sees what's hidden, and the ever-wanting soul sees only what it wants.
From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.