Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves.
Interpretation
Human magnificence is achieved by harnessing the power of nature.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes that the greatness and splendor achieved by humanity are directly linked to our ability to work in harmony with nature. He illustrates this connection by referencing grand creations, like hanging gardens and parks, which serve as examples of how human ingenuity, when united with the natural world, can create beauty and magnificence.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about sustainable living and the importance of preserving nature.
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?
We can hold back neither the coming of the flowers nor the downward rush of the stream; sooner or later, everything comes to its fruition.
The world has different owners at sunrise... Even your own garden does not belong to you. Rabbits and blackbirds have the lawns; a tortoise-shell cat who never appears in daytime patrols the brick walls, and a golden-tailed pheasant glints his way through the iris spears.
. . . perhaps our grandsons, having never seen a wild river, will never miss the chance to set a canoe in singing waters . . . glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.
As full of spirit as the month of May, and as gorgeous as the sun in Midsummer.
The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
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