The human body is a steed that goes freest and longest under a light rider, and the lightest of all riders is a cheerful heart.
Interpretation
A light-hearted approach leads to better overall health and longevity.
This quote suggests that the human body functions best when it is not burdened by stress or negativity. A 'light rider' symbolizes a cheerful heart, indicating that positivity and joy allow us to thrive and endure life's challenges more easily, just as a steed runs better without excessive weight.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a wellness seminar discussing the benefits of a positive mindset.
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth.
Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation to nature because he is freer and his mind more at leisure.
Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
Ender stepped under the water and rinsed himself, took the sweat of combat and let it run down the drain. All gone, except they recycled it and we'll be drinking Bonzo's blood water in the morning. All the life gone out of it, but his blood just the same, his blood and my sweat, washed down in their stupidity or cruelty or whatever it was that made them let it happen.
The true method of knowledge is experiment.
I used to think God guided us by opening and closing doors, but now I know sometimes God wants us to kick some doors down.
Be a mere assistant to your unconscious. Do only half the work. The rest will do itself.
Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain... The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion... and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself--ultimate cost for perfect value
Untrained warriors are soon killed on the battlefield; so also persons untrained in the art of preserving their inner peace are quickly riddled by the bullets of worry and restlessness in active life.
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