We can see well into the past; we can guess shrewdly into the future, but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the obscurity of the present moment compared to our clear memories of the past and our speculative visions of the future.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote captures the complexity of human experience, highlighting how we often find clarity in our memories and conjectures, but struggle to fully comprehend the present. The 'today' is described as being 'rolled up and muffled,' suggesting that while we may be able to rationalize the past and anticipate what lies ahead, the here and now remains elusive and challenging to grasp in its entirety.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about mindfulness and the importance of living in the present.
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?
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
I would by all means have men beware, lest Æsop's pretty fable of the fly that sate [sic] on the pole of a chariot at the Olympic races and said, 'What a dust do I raise,' be verified in them. For so it is that some small observation, and that disturbed sometimes by the instrument, sometimes by the eye, sometimes by the calculation, and which may be owing to some real change in the heaven, raises new heavens and new spheres and circles.
Sell a country?! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?
What's left is palimpsest—one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it.
I can't imagine not being in a phase where I'm trying to understand something or create something. That's the essence of life.
No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.
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