We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them
Interpretation
Life is about navigating the superficial aspects while maintaining depth and grace.
Ralph Waldo Emersonβs quote suggests that our existence is largely focused on the layers that we present to the world, or the 'surfaces'. The true skill lies in how well we can maneuver through these external appearances, blending authenticity and finesse in our interactions and experiences.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal growth and authenticity.
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?
The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
The evangelical movement has become just a bit victimized by a success-oriented culture, wanting the church - like the corporation - to be successful.
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.
Both state and church have as their object actions as well as convictions, the former insofar as they are based on the relations between man and nature, the latter insofar as they are based on the relations between nature and God.
That which is impenetrable to us really exists. Behind the secrets of nature remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.
For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
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