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?
There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.
Any pain entailed in repentance will always be far less than the suffering required to satisfy justice for unresolved transgression.
All of us have worries. We worry because we are intelligent beings. Intelligence predicts, that is its essence; the same intelligence that allows us to plan, hope, imagine, and hypothesize also allows us to worry and anticipate negative outcomes.
Invincibility depends on one's self; the enemy's vulnerability on him.
There is no stress in the world, only people thinking stressful thoughts.
I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.