We can see well into the past; we can guess shrewdly into the future, but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the obscurity of the present moment compared to our clear memories of the past and our speculative visions of the future.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote captures the complexity of human experience, highlighting how we often find clarity in our memories and conjectures, but struggle to fully comprehend the present. The 'today' is described as being 'rolled up and muffled,' suggesting that while we may be able to rationalize the past and anticipate what lies ahead, the here and now remains elusive and challenging to grasp in its entirety.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about mindfulness and the importance of living in the present.
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?
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself And falls on the other side
God can do nothing for me until I recognize the limits of what is humanly possible, allowing Him to do the impossible.
The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I'm a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what's to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble--that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.
If there is no other life, then this one has been enough to make it worth being born myself...a human being.
For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.
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