Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.
Interpretation
Society evolves over time while its individual members remain constant in their essence.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson compares society to a wave, suggesting that although society progresses and changes, the individuals within it retain their foundational identities. The metaphor emphasizes the dynamic nature of society as it flows and transforms, contrasted with the stability of human nature, which remains unchanged despite societal shifts.
In practice
In a speech about the evolution of social norms, one could use this quote to illustrate how society adapts while its core individuals remain true to themselves.
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?
One half of the world's people live on less than two dollars a day. This should concern our national security policy as well as our conscience.
The individual must not merely wait and criticize, he must defend the cause the best he can. The fate of the world will be such as the world deserves.
If atoms do, by chance, happen to combine themselves into so many shapes, why have they never combined together to form a house or a slipper? By the same token, why do we not believe that if innumerable letters of the Greek alphabet were poured all over the market-place they would eventually happen to form the text of the Iliad?
Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest.
Man was not made for the service of economies; economies were made to serve mankind; and men and women were made - so we believe - to serve one another, not just ourselves.
The worse a person is the less he feels it.
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