Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?
Interpretation
The meaning we assign to nature is shaped by our thoughts and perspectives.
In this quote, Emerson reflects on how the natural elements of mountains, waves, and skies do not possess inherent significance; rather, their meaning arises from the way we choose to interpret and represent them in relation to our thoughts and emotions. This underscores the power of human perception and the subjective nature of meaning in the world around us.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of perspective in art, this quote can illustrate how artists imbue meaning into their work based on their thoughts.
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?
We worship God through our questions.
Five to six thousand people die every year waiting for organs, but nobody cares.
A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two.
It's always interesting about God because it's like all of the religions in the world say that they pray to the same God, and yet they ask that same one God to divide itself up and agree with this one and fight against that one.
Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas . . . for it is the assertion of a universal negative.
Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.
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