When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.
Interpretation
Young people try to learn and define everything but realize that true understanding is elusive and incomplete.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson reflects on the youthful ambition to capture and categorize the vast complexities of life, encompassing concepts like religion, love, and art. However, as time passes, he suggests that the pursuit of a definitive understanding often leads to the realization that knowledge is an ever-expanding journey rather than a destination; the ultimate truths remain just out of reach, symbolized by the parabola that consists of arcs that never intersect.
In practice
In a discussion about the quest for knowledge with students.
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?
Early in life, I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change
Traveling makes men wiser, but less happy.
The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation.
When you take your attention into the present moment, a certain alertness arises. You become more conscious of what's around you, but also, strangely, a sense of presence that is both within and without.
there is no reason why anyone should understand how it works… and of course no reason why anyone should care … unless you are curious, in which case I love you, for curiosity about the world and all its corners is a beautiful thing.
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