Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that sleep has a persistent influence on our lives, much like the continuous presence of night around a fir tree.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote emphasizes the idea that sleep is a fundamental and ever-present aspect of human experience. Just as night envelops the fir tree throughout the day, sleep lingers in our lives, suggesting that it is a natural state that shapes our existence and consciousness. This metaphorical connection enhances the understanding of how deeply intertwined sleep is with our daily lives and overall well-being.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of rest and recovery, one could use this quote to highlight the significance of sleep in our lives.
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?
The world has a soul and whoever understands that soul can also understand the language of many things.
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
A true man never frets about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star.
Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.
Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.
That is why Bias jested with those who were going through the perils of a great storm with him and calling on the gods for help: "Shut up," he said, "so that they do not realize that you are here with me.
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