If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.
Interpretation
True wisdom is not found in material pursuits or distractions, but in the simplicity of nature.
In this quote, Emerson emphasizes that excessive focus on urban life, materialism, and sensory pleasures detracts from one's ability to attain true wisdom. Instead, he suggests that solitude in nature, represented by the 'lonely waste of the pinewoods,' is where deeper understanding and insight can be found.
In practice
This quote can be shared at a gathering focused on the importance of reconnecting with 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?
What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.
I have seen slower people than I am and more deliberate... and even quieter, and more listless, and lazier people than I am. But they were dead.
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes.
When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, 'Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.'
Only fools, liars, and charlatans predict earthquakes
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