If you would serve your brother it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back your words when you find that prudent people do not commend you. Be true to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age.
Interpretation
Stay true to your values and actions, regardless of others' opinions.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the importance of remaining authentic to oneself and one's actions, even when faced with criticism or lack of approval from others. He encourages individuals to embrace their unique contributions and to find satisfaction in their actions, especially when those actions may deviate from societal norms and expectations, helping to break the monotony of conformity.
In practice
During a motivational speech about embracing one's uniqueness.
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?
Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details. Knowledge is not intelligence. In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected. Change alone is unchanging. The same road goes both up and down. The beginning of a circle is also its end. Not I, but the world says it: all is one. And yet everything comes in season.
Though the object of being a Great Power is to be able to fight a Great War, the only way of remaining a Great Power is not to fight one.
What view is one likely to take of the state of a person's mind when his speech is wild and incoherent and knows no constraint?
Whoever realizes that the six senses aren't real, that the five aggregates are fictions, that no such things can be located anywhere in the body, understands the language of Buddhas.
Just as we're all students throughout life, we're all teachers. In fact, we learn best by offering what we desire for ourselves to as many individuals as we can, as frequently as we can.....Following this line of thinking, it's imperative that we make deliberate effort to increase our inspirational energy, as this will lead us to being both a spiritual learner and teacher simultaneously.
Of the tyrant, spies and informers are the principal instruments. War is his favorite occupation, for the sake of engrossing the attention of the people, and making himself necessary to them as their leader.
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