I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the complexity of the world and how our attempts to find absolute truth can lead to misunderstandings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson expresses the idea that the world is inherently mysterious, and our efforts to impose our interpretations onto it can make it seem less benign. He suggests that if individuals with genuine spiritual insight and purpose come together, they could easily embrace and transform the world around them, like taking a ripe peach, indicating both the potential ease of this task and the sweet rewards of such enlightenment.
In practice
This quote could be used in a philosophical discussion about the nature of reality and our understanding of it.
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?
A banker warned the British poet Robert Graves that one could not grow rich writing poetry. He replied that if there was no money in poetry, there was certainly no poetry in money, and so it was all even.
Whatever is arising in this moment, whatever condition, is part of the isness of life and therefore accepting it fully makes you an expression of the enormous power of life itself-true intelligence, which only comes when you stop obstructing the power of the present moment.
I believe that the place where an animal dies is a sacred one. There is a need to bring ritual into the conventional slaughter plants and use as a means to shape people's behavior. It would help prevent people from becoming numbed, callous, or cruel. The ritual could be something very simple, such as a moment of silence. In addition to developing better designs and making equipment to insure the humane treatments of all animals, that would be my contribution.
The real person you are is revealed in the moments when you're certain no other person is watching. When no one is watching, you are driven by what you expect of yourself.
Life without Liberty is like a body without spirit. Liberty without thought is like a disturbed spirit.
I would not enter on my list of friends_x000D_ _x000D_ (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense,_x000D_ _x000D_ Yet wanting sensibility) the man_x000D_ _x000D_ Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.
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