The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent.
Interpretation
Nature is abundant and spreads many seeds to ensure survival and growth despite many facing challenges.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote highlights the resilience and abundance inherent in nature. It suggests that plants produce an overwhelming number of seeds, acknowledging that while many will not survive, this overproduction ensures that some will thrive and continue the cycle of life. This illustrates the idea of hope and the determination to persist, reinforcing the importance of not only survival but also the potential for regeneration and continuity in the natural world.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about environmental conservation to emphasize the resilience of nature.
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 climb, I backtrack. I float. I ramble my way home.
Anyone who thinks humans are not capable of so fouling their own nest that the land and the waters can no longer be productive just hasn't been paying attention.
Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
Farming as we do it is hunting, and in the sea we act like barbarians.
The Caribbean is an immense ocean that just happens to have a few islands in it. The people have an immense respect for it, awe of it.
There is another sort of day which needs celebrating in song -- the day of days when spring at last holds up her face to be kissed, deliberate and unabashed. On that day no wind blows either in the hills or in the mind.
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