Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Enlarge not thy destiny, said the oracle: endeavor not to do more than is given thee in charge.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Spiritual Laws." Essays: First Series, James Munroe and Company, 1841, p. 119.
This quotation is sometimes used as an illustration of a difficulty that many Western officials have in dealing with Islamic governments. Failure of their plans, policies, and strategies do not become a learning experience or an example to guide the future. The failure was the will of Allah and not the result of the policy. So repeating the strategy of staying with the policy is not per se destructive or useless. Allah may favor it the next time. So there are no consequences of bad policies. Only destiny which Allah has shaped for any of a thousand reasons which are not known to man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
