A weed is a plant whose virtue is not yet known.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that value is often determined by knowledge and perspective, rather than inherent qualities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote, 'A weed is a plant whose virtue is not yet known,' implies that what we often dismiss as undesirable or worthless may hold untapped potential or worth. It encourages a reevaluation of our perceptions regarding nature, and by extension, life β urging us to consider that every entity has merit, waiting to be discovered, depending on our understanding and context.
In practice
In a discussion about gardening, to encourage people to see beauty in all plants.
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?
To be perfectly just is an attribute of the divine nature; to be so to the utmost of our abilities, is the glory of man.
Bad people...are in conflict with themselves; they desire one thing and will another, like the incontinent who choose harmful pleasures instead of what they themselves believe to be good.
Universality of the UN is a worthwhile thing in its own self because it means that every country belongs, feels it has a stake, and participates, rather than going away and finding other methods of conducting international relations.
Relativity applies to physics, not ethics.
Somewhere between apathy and anarchy lies the thinking human being.
[E]very act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this, would be to affirm, that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers, may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid.
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