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Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 3/7/2009 Posts: 33,615 Neurons: 100,023 Location: Inside Farlex computers
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 Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
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 Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 10/25/2014 Posts: 160 Neurons: 122,829 Location: Koraput, Orissa, India
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Yes nature needs to be changed with time else the individual tends to become stagnant
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Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 8/5/2014 Posts: 1,016 Neurons: 156,985
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Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Human/huwoman nature is a complex and volatile phenomenon!
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 Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 7/16/2014 Posts: 177 Neurons: 559,249 Location: Ivanovo, Ivanovo, Russia
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And man destroys nature...
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 Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 1/28/2015 Posts: 11,502 Neurons: 4,749,353 Location: Kolkata, Bengal, India
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Song of Nature
Mine are the night and morning, The pits of air, the gulf of space, The sportive sun, the gibbous moon, The innumerable days.
I hid in the solar glory, I am dumb in the pealing song, I rest on the pitch of the torrent, In slumber I am strong.
No numbers have counted my tallies, No tribes my house can fill, I sit by the shining Fount of Life, And pour the deluge still;
And ever by delicate powers Gathering along the centuries From race on race the rarest flowers, My wreath shall nothing miss.
And many a thousand summers My apples ripened well, And light from meliorating stars With firmer glory fell.
I wrote the past in characters Of rock and fire the scroll, The building in the coral sea, The planting of the coal.
And thefts from satellites and rings And broken stars I drew, And out of spent and aged things I formed the world anew;
What time the gods kept carnival, Tricked out in star and flower, And in cramp elf and saurian forms They swathed their too much power.
Time and Thought were my surveyors, They laid their courses well, They boiled the sea, and baked the layers Or granite, marl, and shell.
But he, the man-child glorious,-- Where tarries he the while? The rainbow shines his harbinger, The sunset gleams his smile.
My boreal lights leap upward, Forthright my planets roll, And still the man-child is not born, The summit of the whole.
Must time and tide forever run? Will never my winds go sleep in the west? Will never my wheels which whirl the sun And satellites have rest?
Too much of donning and doffing, Too slow the rainbow fades, I weary of my robe of snow, My leaves and my cascades;
I tire of globes and races, Too long the game is played; What without him is summer's pomp, Or winter's frozen shade?
I travail in pain for him, My creatures travail and wait; His couriers come by squadrons, He comes not to the gate.
Twice I have moulded an image, And thrice outstretched my hand, Made one of day, and one of night, And one of the salt sea-sand.
One in a Judaean manger, And one by Avon stream, One over against the mouths of Nile, And one in the Academe.
I moulded kings and saviours, And bards o'er kings to rule;-- But fell the starry influence short, The cup was never full.
Yet whirl the glowing wheels once more, And mix the bowl again; Seethe, fate! the ancient elements, Heat, cold, wet, dry, and peace, and pain.
Let war and trade and creeds and song Blend, ripen race on race, The sunburnt world a man shall breed Of all the zones, and countless days.
No ray is dimmed, no atom worn, My oldest force is good as new, And the fresh rose on yonder thorn Gives back the bending heavens in dew. Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 3/26/2013 Posts: 3,513 Neurons: 360,622 Location: Minsk, Minskaya Voblasts', Belarus
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To be, or what to be, that is the question...
Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
Methinks it is like a weasel.
It is backed like a weasel.
Or like a whale?
Very like a whale.
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 Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 11/25/2014 Posts: 655 Neurons: 76,546 Location: Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires F.D., Argentina
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An oxymoron is a figure of speech that juxtaposes elements that appear to be contradictory. Some oxymora reveal inadvertent errors but others are purposely crafted to reveal a paradox, intentionally made up for effect and this must be the case here
Something MUTABLE is supposed to change, it can never be the same. "ALWAYS THE SAME" and "NEVER THE SAME" : a veritable paradox
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Joined: 1/7/2015 Posts: 20 Neurons: 11,356 Location: Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, India
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As nature tranforms man should also change himself according to it.
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Joined: 2/4/2014 Posts: 8,746 Neurons: 7,511,816 Location: Bogotá, Bogota D.C., Colombia
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From Emerson's Essays - Essay I page 11 Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why should we be such hard pedants, and magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with them as a young child plays with graybeards and in churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and, far back in the womb of things, sees the rays parting from one orb, that diverge ere they fall by infinite diameters. Genius watches the monad through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature. Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless individuals, the fixed species; through many species, the genus; through all genera, the steadfast type; through all the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unity. Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same. She casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes twenty fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The adamant streams into soft but precise form before it, and, whilst I look at it, its outline and texture are changed again. Nothing is so fleeting as form; yet never does it quite deny itself. In man we still trace the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of servitude in the lower races; yet in him they enhance his nobleness and grace; as Io, in Aeschylus, transformed to a cow, offends the imagination; but how changed, when as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris-Jove, a beautiful woman, with nothing of the metamorphosis left but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament of her brows! http://www.emersoncentral.com/history.htm
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Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 5/30/2014 Posts: 1,698 Neurons: 5,079,026 Location: Boston, Massachusetts, United States
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nature never stop
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 Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 4/14/2011 Posts: 264 Neurons: 10,072 Location: Colonie, New York, United States
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Thank you monamagda for the passage. I located it also, but still find it quite as mystifying as the fragment quoted. He seems to say that the generating formula of creation, though unchanging, produces the multitude we see about us; and we, humanity are the beautiful outcome of this creative principle, though ascending among less noble forms.
What "badges of servitude" is he referring to when he writes:
"In man we still trace the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of servitude in the lower races; yet in him they enhance his nobleness and grace"
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 Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 7/26/2014 Posts: 1,405 Neurons: 37,072 Location: Apache Junction, Arizona, United States
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Very, very true......
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Joined: 2/10/2015 Posts: 8 Neurons: 23,718 Location: Cotia, Sao Paulo, Brazil
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Very nice quote'
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Joined: 3/23/2015 Posts: 1 Neurons: 8 Location: The Hague, South Holland, Netherlands
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mmm. so beautiful. From otherside nature to human nature. Want to share with my favorite passage by Emerson Texts : Essays: First Series : SELF-RELIANCE But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee. =d> =d> =d> I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; — read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.
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