The world always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that the world's problems have been consistent across time, appearing bleak to each generation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote reflects on the timelessness of the world's struggles and challenges. He indicates that each generation perceives the world as having a 'bankrupt look', suggesting a loss of potential or value, and implies that these feelings have persisted throughout history, connecting us with those who came before us as they faced their own trials and disillusionments.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the cyclical nature of human problems at a philosophy class.
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?
At some point you have to stop acting as though life is happening to you and acknowledge the ways you are happening to it. Once you take responsibility for your side of the street, you grant yourself the power to improve every aspect of your life by simply acting and behaving differently.
For many people, Timbuktu has long represented the essence of remoteness: a mythical, faraway place located on the boundaries of our collective consciousness. But like many of the myths associated with colonialism, the reality is very different.
I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I felt that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actor, kidding ourselves on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between those two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.
Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion go hand in hand.
The challenge is to lend conviction even to the voices which advocate views I find personally abhorrent, whether they are political Islamists or officers justifying a coup.
Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.
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