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?
If there is no other life, then this one has been enough to make it worth being born myself...a human being.
Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.
I do not understand how you can associate abortion with an idea of hedonism or the good life.
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn't get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer.
Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.