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?
With a lot of songs on this record, one verse doesn't relate to the next verse. I don't think that one day really relates to the next day in life.
That feelings of love and hate make rational judgments impossible in public affairs, as in private affairs, we can clearly enough see in others, though not so clearly in ourselves.
The framers of our Constitution meant we were to have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.
Well I do think there are people who are habitually negative and depressed and take the opposite approach because they imagine the worst, and their minds become dominated by that. They let their own emotions and expectations transform their perceptions of the world.
The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.
I do not know all of the providences of the Lord, but I do know that he permits false doctrine to be taught in and out of the Church and that such teaching is part of the sifting process of mortality
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