I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a deep appreciation for nature akin to a child's love, highlighting its nurturing qualities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson articulates a profound connection with nature, suggesting that it embodies a love that is pure and innocent, much like the affection a child holds for the world around them. He likens his experience of life to the vibrant growth of corn and melons in the warm sun, illustrating that nature is life-giving and essential for flourishing, underscoring an intrinsic harmony between humanity and the natural world.
In practice
During a nature conference, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of preserving the environment.
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?
We are already perilously close to killing off the top of the oceanic food chain - with catastrophic consequences that we can't begin to imagine. Let us not, in the heat of anger, reduce the already devastated population of great white sharks by one more member.
I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.
This hill crossed with broken pines and maples lumpy with the burial mounds of uprooted hemlocks (hurricane of '38) out of their rotting hearts generations rise trying once more to become the forest just beyond them tall enough to be called trees in their youth like aspen a bouquet of young beech is gathered they still wear last summer's leaves the lightest brown almost translucent how their stubbornness has decorated the winter woods.
I'd like to see animals removed from the entertainment business. Chimpanzees and apes won't perform unless you beat them. Circuses keep elephants in chains 90 percent of the time. Elephants need freedom of movement. In circuses, they live in cramped quarters, which is not the life intended for them by nature. Some are beaten daily, forced to do ridiculous tricks and robbed of every shred of dignity.
A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves.
Agriculture is the most healthful, most useful, and most noble employment of man
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