Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that those who embrace curiosity and imagination are more likely to encounter life's adventures and mysteries, while others miss opportunities due to complacency.
Algernon Blackwood suggests that life offers many adventures and mysterious experiences to those who actively seek them out with a sense of wonder and an imaginative mindset. In contrast, most people overlook these opportunities because they are blinded by their assumptions and fail to recognize the possibilities that exist in their surroundings. By being open and attentive, one can discover the richness of life that lies beyond the surface.
In practice
Use this quote in a speech about embracing creativity and innovation in the workplace.
When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us.
I've always liked the idea of making things that last forever, not necessarily in the sense of being unbreakable, but more psychologically permanent. Most people throw stuff away not because it's broken but because their relationship with that object is broken.
I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
The Way is basically perfect. It doesn't require perfecting.
As we walked, I began to wonder what the opposite of molting was and why, unlike the body, which sheds everything, the soul cannot let go but compiles and accumulates, growing annual rings around the things it wants and dreams and remembers
I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it comes upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: This is the real me!.
For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'It might have been'.
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