Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on how societies evolve by adopting new skills and knowledge while losing innate human instincts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote suggests that as cultures develop and embrace new arts and technologies, they often move away from the basic instincts and natural behaviors that once guided them. This evolution indicates a kind of progress but also hints at a potential loss of essential human traits, highlighting the tension between advancement and the fundamental aspects of humanity.
In practice
A speaker discussing the impact of technology on human interactions could use this quote to emphasize the trade-offs involved.
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?
Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure, and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard.
I believe in the freedom of expression, unequivocally - though, as I have written before, I wish more people would understand that freedom of expression is not freedom from consequence.
The White man pays Reverend Martin Luther King so that Martin Luther King can keep the Negro defenseless.
I think that if one is faced by inevitable destruction -- if a house is falling upon you, for instance -- one must feel a great longing to sit down, close one's eyes and wait, come what may . . .
Sweet Memory! wafted by thy gentle gale, Oft up the stream of Time I turn my sail.
For all professional pilots there exists a kind of guild, without charter and without by-laws. it demands no requirements for inclusion save an understanding of the wind, the compass, the rudder, and fair fellowship.
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