We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that we are surrounded by a vast, profound understanding that influences our lives.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote highlights the idea that we exist within an environment filled with deep intelligence and wisdom. It implies that there is a greater knowledge at play in the universe, guiding our actions and thoughts, and that we should be aware of and reflect upon this intelligence as it shapes our experiences and understanding of life.
In practice
In a philosophical discussion about the nature of existence and intelligence.
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?
She tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.
Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.
Ordinary morality is innate in my view.
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
He, however, who begins with Metaphysics, will not only become confused in matters of religion, but will fall into complete infidelity.
One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That's the new gloss on the First Amendment.
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