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?
It is not enough to reach for the brass ring. You must also enjoy the merry go round.
There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams...
Life was a fairy-tale, then, it is a tragedy now. When I was 43 and John Hay 41 he said life was a tragedy after 40, and I disputed it. Three years ago he asked me to testify again: I counted my graves, and there was nothing for me to say. I am old; I recognize it but I don't realize it. I wonder if a person ever really ceases to feel young - I mean, for a whole day at a time.
Music became a healer for me. And I learned to listen with all my being. I found that it could wipe away all the emotions of fear and confusion relating to my family.
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
... swept into the giddy vortex which keeps so many young people revolving aimlessly, till they go down or are cast upon the shore, wrecks of what they might have been
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