The world is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day.
Interpretation
Life is a transient experience, and we have the potential to awaken to greater truths.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that the world as we perceive it is akin to a dream, filled with illusions and uncertainties. The 'awake' signifies a moment of realization or enlightenment where one recognizes the deeper truths and beauties of life, akin to seeing the 'glories and certainties of day' after a night of dreams.
In practice
During a discussion about the nature of reality.
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?
In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.
To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
Our wish is that...[there be] maintained that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry or that of his fathers.
We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call their gods, we name otherwise.
Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.
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