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?
In the Destroyer's steps there spring up bright creations that defy his power, and his dark path becomes a way of light to Heaven.
...when everything else fails, we communicate in the language of the stars
Competing is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals.
Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.
People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.
Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.
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