At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that the world often imposes trivial distractions upon us, which can obstruct our focus and clarity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote reflects the idea that in our lives, we often encounter numerous trivialities and distractions that can feel overwhelming and burdensome. It implies that these 'emphatic trifles' can conspire against our ability to engage with more significant, meaningful aspects of life, thereby urging us to maintain perspective and resist the allure of the insignificant.
In practice
During a motivational speech, to emphasize the need to prioritize what truly matters.
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?
What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make others people's decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or at the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it must be levity.
I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system - that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality.
I started out thinking of America as highways and state lines. As I got to know it better, I began to think of it as rivers.
Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.
Race was thick in the O.J. Simpson case from the very beginning, but it wasn't evident. And I think the O.J. Simpson case revealed that there is subtle race, and there is sophisticated race, and there's evident and observable race.
The great and rare mystics of the past . . . were, in fact, ahead of their time, and are still ahead of ours. In other words, they most definitely are not figures of the past. They are figures of the future.
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