The world is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day.
Interpretation
Life is a transient experience, and we have the potential to awaken to greater truths.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that the world as we perceive it is akin to a dream, filled with illusions and uncertainties. The 'awake' signifies a moment of realization or enlightenment where one recognizes the deeper truths and beauties of life, akin to seeing the 'glories and certainties of day' after a night of dreams.
In practice
During a discussion about the nature of reality.
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 future is like heaven-everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.
Your goal is not to battle with the mind, but to witness the mind.
Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.
War forgets peace. Peace forgives war. War is the death of the life human. Peace is the birth of the Life Divine. Our vital passions want war. Our psychic emotions desire peace.
Who can leap the world's ties and sit with me among white clouds?
Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.
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