Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.
Interpretation
Embrace risks and learn from your experiences without fear of failure.
Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the importance of taking risks and experimenting in life. He encourages individuals to overcome fear and timidity, suggesting that even failures are valuable lessons that contribute to personal growth and resilience. The act of 'getting rolled in the dirt' symbolizes the inevitable setbacks one faces, but it also serves as an opportunity to rise again, equipped with newfound courage and wisdom.
In practice
In a motivational speech encouraging young entrepreneurs to take risks.
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?
My father's approach to the most brutal and unambiguous social injustices during the civil rights struggle was rooted in nonviolence as a morally and tactically correct response.
Let me alone: I have yet my legs and one arm. Tell the surgeon to make haste and his instruments. I know I must lose my right arm, so the sooner it's off the better.
Fighting is endurance, knocking a guy out in 10 seconds is not fighting, its beating him to the punch. But when you put in that time, that is fighting because you are thinking
If he must be alone, he would make solitude his armor.
The more the panic grows, the more uplifting the image of a man who refuses to bow to the terror.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
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