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?
I will go back to my life when women in captivity go back to their lives, when my community has a place, when I see people accountable for their crimes.
If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, "There lived a great people-a black people-who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.
The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress, and grows brave by reflection.
I gave myself permission to feel and experience all of my emotions. In order to do that, I had to stop being afraid to feel. In order to do that, I taught myself to believe that no matter what I felt or what happened when I felt it, I would be okay.
It is a worthy thing to fight for one's freedom; it is another sight finer to fight for another man's.
To gain a crown by fighting is great, to reject it divine.
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