Look sharply after your own thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen on your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear; and you shall never find that perception again; never, I say-but perhaps years, ages, and I know not what events and worlds my lie between you and its return.
Interpretation
Be mindful of your thoughts as they come unexpectedly and can easily be forgotten if not acknowledged.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote emphasizes the importance of being aware of our thoughts as they can appear suddenly and be deeply insightful. If we neglect these thoughts, treating them as mere distractions from our daily tasks, they may vanish forever, leaving us with a gap in our understanding and creativity that could take years to revisit or rediscover.
In practice
Using this quote in a workshop on mindfulness to emphasize the significance of paying attention to one's thoughts.
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?
When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.
Few among men are they who cross to the further shore. The others merely run up and down the bank on this side.
He possesses dominion over himself, and is happy, who can every day say, "I have lived." Tomorrow the heavenly father may either involve the world in dark clouds, or cheer it with clear sunshine, he will not, however, render ineffectual the things which have already taken place.
You don't meditate once and suddenly your life turns around. What it does is it lets you train your brain to be able to become more stable in an action-oriented way.
The man who has planned badly, if fortune is on his side, may have had a stroke of luck; but his plan was a bad one nonetheless.
However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because of the surrounding circumstances, these talents will be still-born.
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