When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.
Interpretation
Young people try to learn and define everything but realize that true understanding is elusive and incomplete.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson reflects on the youthful ambition to capture and categorize the vast complexities of life, encompassing concepts like religion, love, and art. However, as time passes, he suggests that the pursuit of a definitive understanding often leads to the realization that knowledge is an ever-expanding journey rather than a destination; the ultimate truths remain just out of reach, symbolized by the parabola that consists of arcs that never intersect.
In practice
In a discussion about the quest for knowledge with students.
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?
It may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us.
The most unhappy people in the world are those who face the days without knowing what to do with their time. But if you have more projects than you have time for, you are not going to be an unhappy person. This is as much a question of having imagination and curiosity as it is of actually making plans.
Zeal without knowledge is fire without light.
But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.
To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult.
Meditation is nothing but withdrawing all the barriers .. thoughts, emotions, sentiments .. which criteria wall between you and existence. The moment they drop, you suddenly find yourself in tune with the whole; not only in tune, you really find you are the whole.
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