The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.
Interpretation
Grief can reveal the superficiality of our attachment to things, highlighting what truly matters.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson reflects on the nature of grief and its transformative lessons. He suggests that experiencing grief can lead one to understand the transient and often shallow nature of what we hold dear, prompting a deeper awareness of life's true values and the importance of meaningful connections beyond mere attachments.
In practice
In a speech about coping with loss, one might say, 'As Ralph Waldo Emerson poignantly puts it, the only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.'
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?
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
Stubborn selfishness leads otherwise good people to fight over herds, patches of sand, and strippings of milk. All this results from what the Lord calls coveting "the drop," while neglecting the "more weighty matters." (D&C 117:8) Myopic selfishness magnifies a mess of pottage and makes thirty pieces of silver look like a treasure trove. In our intense acquisitiveness, we forget Him who once said, "What is property unto me?"
Perfect freedom is as necessary to the health and vigor of commerce as it is to the health and vigor of citizenship.
Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. Iβm an agent of chaos, and you know the thing about chaos? It's fair.
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
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