The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the idea that children perceive the world with more openness and wonder than adults.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote suggests that children have a unique ability to appreciate and internalize the beauty and truth of the world around them. While adults may see only what is in front of their eyes, children engage with their surroundings on a deeper emotional level, allowing the light of the sun to touch not just their sight but also their hearts. This highlights the importance of maintaining a sense of wonder and emotional connection to the world as one grows older.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of childlike wonder in education.
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?
I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.
Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
I was warmed by the sun, rocked by the winds and sheltered by the trees as other Indian babes. I was living peaceably when people began to speak bad of me. Now I can eat well, sleep well and be glad. I can go everywhere with a good feeling.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.