You take a weakness and start making it stronger.. You don't have to build your strengths - that you already possess... It is your weakness that needs the exercise
Interpretation
Focus on improving weaknesses rather than solely relying on your existing strengths.
This quote emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and working on our weaknesses instead of only celebrating our strengths. Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that true growth comes from addressing our shortcomings, as enhancing these areas can lead to a more balanced and capable individual.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal development, you might say, 'Remember, you take a weakness and start making it stronger.'
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?
Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution.
The end of suffering happens in this very moment, whether you're watching a terrorist attack or doing the dishes. And compassion begins at home. Because I don't believe my thoughts, sadness can't exist. That's how I can go to the depths of anyone's suffering, if they invite me, and take them by the hand and walk them out of it into the sunlight of reality. I've taken that walk myself.
Attention is the vital thing and there is no tension in attention. It just happens to be a similar word. It's not concentration or straining. Attention has the openness of a young child not yet dominated by the conceptual mind.
The weak are dominated by their ego, the wise dominate their ego, and the intelligent are in a constant struggle against their ego.
it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
It is much easier to try one's hand at many things than to concentrate one's powers on one thing.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.