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?
Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class.
No two men ever judged alike of the same thing, and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly similar, not only in different men but in the same men at different times.
Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.
The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.
The pleasure of despair. But then, it is in despair that we find the most acute pleasure, especially when we are aware of the hopelessness of the situation... ...everything is a mess in which it is impossible to tell what's what, but that despite this impossibility and deception it still hurts you, and the less you can understand, the more it hurts.
I don't like the term 'colour-blind' - because I don't want people to be blind to my colour.
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