Some of your griefs you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you've endured From evils that never arrived.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the nature of grief, emphasizing that much of our suffering comes from anticipating troubles that never actually occur.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote highlights the human experience of grief, where we may overcome some sorrow but often carry with us the burden of anxiety over potential future misfortunes. It emphasizes that the emotional toll we endure from imagined troubles can sometimes be greater than the grief we experience from real losses, prompting a reflection on the unnecessary weight of our worries about what may never happen.
In practice
In a speech about mental health, one can say: 'As Ralph Waldo Emerson wisely observed, much of our grief comes from the torments of what never came to pass.'
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'm just tired of everything…even of the echoes. There is nothing in my life but echoes…echoes of lost hopes and dreams and joys. They're beautiful and mocking.
Life did not present its sunny side to thee.
When we walk like (we are rushing), we print anxiety and sorrow on the earth. We have to walk in a way that we only print peace and serenity on the earth... Be aware of the contact between your feet and the earth. Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.
I have been uncompromising, peppery, intractable, monomaniacal, tactless, volatile, and oftentimes disagreeable... I suppose I'm larger than life.
[...]It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer reason to survive.
One of the pitfalls about writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise-beyond-their-years creatures or these sad-eyed tragic people. And the truth is, people living with cancer are very much like people who are not living with cancer. They're every bit as funny and complex and diverse as anyone else.
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