I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the complexity of the world and how our attempts to find absolute truth can lead to misunderstandings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson expresses the idea that the world is inherently mysterious, and our efforts to impose our interpretations onto it can make it seem less benign. He suggests that if individuals with genuine spiritual insight and purpose come together, they could easily embrace and transform the world around them, like taking a ripe peach, indicating both the potential ease of this task and the sweet rewards of such enlightenment.
In practice
This quote could be used in a philosophical discussion about the nature of reality and our understanding of it.
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?
As for me, I am deeply a democrat; this is why I am in no way a socialist. Democracy and socialism cannot go together. You can't have it both ways. Socialism is a new form of slavery.
Silence is the nest and music is the bird. The bird leaves the nest early in the morning and returns to the nest in the evening. Similarly, in the spiritual world, divine music comes from the inmost soul of Silence.
No place of grace for those who avoid the Face. No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the Voice.
Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.
Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.
Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.
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