The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship
Interpretation
True happiness comes from understanding and appreciating nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote suggests that the ultimate happiness can be attained through a deep connection with nature. By observing and learning from the natural world, we gain insight and wisdom that enrich our lives, inviting us to adopt an attitude of reverence and gratitude towards the environment around us.
In practice
In a speech about environmental conservation, one might say, 'As Ralph Waldo Emerson wisely noted, the happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.'
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 ought to be gardens for all months in the year, in which, severally, things of beauty may be then in season.
We feel the beauty of nature because we are part of nature and because we know that however much in our separate domains we abstract from the unity of Nature, this unity remains. Although we may deal with particulars, we return finally to the whole pattern woven out of these.
Sometimes I spend all day trying to count the leaves on a single tree... Of course I have to give up, but by then I'm half crazy with the wonder of it--the abundance of the leaves, the quietness of the branches, the hopelessness of my effort. And I am in that delicious and important place, roaring with laughter, full of earth-praise.
It is important what you eat now, what you do now. If we were interested in a sustainable planet where other generations have a right to a decent future, we would not live like this.
All still when summer is over stand shocks in the field, nothing left to whisper, not even good-bye, to the wind. After summer was over we knew winter would come: we knew silence would wait, tall, patient calm.
The ecological crisis shows the urgency of a solidarity which embraces time and space... A greater sense of intergenerational solidarity is urgently needed. Future generations cannot be saddled with the cost of our use of common environmental resources.
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