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?
An independent Ireland would see its own independence in jeopardy the moment it saw the independence of Britain seriously threatened. Mutual self-interest would make the peoples of these two islands, if both independent, the closest possible allies in a moment of real national danger to either.
To a large extent, whether you suffer depends on how you respond to a given situation.
The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.
He came like the wind, like the wind touched everything, and like the wind was gone. -from The Dragon Reborn. By Loial, son of Arent son of Halan, the Fourth Age.
You're quite right there," he said. "I have practiced abstinence myself for years, and had my time of fasting, too, but now I find myself once more beneath the sign of Aquarius, a dark and humid constellation.
It is the strange fate of man, that even in the greatest of evils the fear of the worst continues to haunt him.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.