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?
Let us open our leaves like a flower, and be passive and receptive.
If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go.... This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.
It is in man's heart that the life of nature's spectacle exists; to see it, one must feel it.
The divine communicates to us primarily through the language of the natural world. Not to hear the natural world is not to hear the divine.
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
But we still find the world astounding, we can't get enough of it; even as it shrivels, even as its many lights flicker and are extinguished (the tigers, the leopard frogs, the plunging dolphin flukes), flicker and are extinguished, by us, by us, we gaze and gaze. Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.
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