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?
As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder, and that craves wary walking.
You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.
He who has felt his own ruin will not imagine the case of any to be hopeless; nor will he think them too fallen to be worthy his regard.
In my clinical experience, the greatest block to a person's development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.
A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.
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