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 wave is driven by wave_x000D_ And each, pursued, pursues the wave ahead,_x000D_ So time flies on and follows, flies, and follows,_x000D_ Always, for ever and new. What was before_x000D_ Is left behind; what never was is now;_x000D_ And every passing moment is renewed.
Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.
I think the O.J. Simpson trial was a revelation about the ongoing patterns of racial difference in American society.
Harry closed his eyes. He never wanted to open them again. His heart sent this message to his molecules: "For reasons obvious to all of us, this galaxy is dissolved!
Before an attack, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can't complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.
Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world.
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