The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoology, (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature's dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure and useful results.
Interpretation
Nature holds hidden potential and valuable outcomes, even in unpredictable circumstances.
Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that early endeavors in various fields such as agriculture, astronomy, and zoology reveal a fundamental truth about nature: it can be deceptive and unpredictable, yet within its chaos lies the potential for significant discoveries and benefits. This perspective encourages us to recognize and seek out the valuable lessons and results that emerge from what may initially seem like randomness or disorder.
In practice
In a speech about environmental conservation, one might say, 'As Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out, nature's hidden gifts can be found if we take the time to explore her depths.'
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?
Since I was a boy, from this house, I was out rescuing crocodiles and snakes. My mum and dad were very passionate about that and, I was lucky enough to go along.
I just think that gardening is about the future, a slow thing, that is deep and spiritual as well as spiritually rewarding.
Whoever wants me to talk, I'll come over and tell them about the necessity of preserving the Everglades.
If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.
The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman's coal buttons. No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.
Once more I am the silent one who came out of the distance wrapped in cold rain and bells: I owe to earth's pure death the will to sprout.
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