The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the deep, often unseen connection between nature and humanity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote expresses the profound joy that comes from experiencing nature, suggesting that there exists a hidden, mystical relationship between human beings and the natural world around them. He implies that engaging with the fields and woods can lead to insights and connections that are not immediately apparent, inviting individuals to explore and appreciate the deeper meanings and relationships present in nature.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about environmental conservation to emphasize the emotional connection people have 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?
There is a terribly terrestrial mindset about what we need to do to take care of the planet-as if the ocean somehow doesn't matter or is so big, so vast that it can take care of itself, or that there is nothing that we could possibly do that we could harm the ocean...We are learning otherwise.
At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt the longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam.
I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Well, in some ways we're not successful at all. We're destroying our home. That's not a bit successful.
Peering down into the water where the morning sun fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay trapped each twig, each grain of sediment, long flakes and blades of light in the dusty water sliding away like optic strobes where motes sifted and spun.
Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.
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