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?
Emotions are classes in the Earth school. Some classes are about fear, and some are about love. The Universe is your tutor, and your classroom is your life. The main course in the Earth school, Authentic Power, is the same for everyone, but different students need different courses in order to complete it.
I have one talent, and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised, surprised at life, at ideas. This is to me the supreme Hasidic imperative: Don't be old. Don't be stale.
There are hunters and there are victims. By your discipline...you will decide if you are a hunter or a victim.
Self-respect is the fruit of discipline.
Each daughter of God is of infinite worth because of her divine mission.
I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.
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