Essays: First Series
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1,579 passages indexed from Essays: First Series (Ralph Waldo Emerson) — Page 15 of 32
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Essays: First Series, passage 991
But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.
Essays: First Series, passage 1268
[Footnote 342: Euripides. A Greek tragic poet of the fifth century before Christ.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1249
[Footnote 319: Lord Evandale, Balfour of Burley. These are characters in Scott's novel, _Old Mortality_. The passage referred to by Emerson is in the forty-second chapter.]
Essays: First Series, passage 48
"I love Emerson's book, not for its detached opinions, not even for the scheme of the general world he has framed for himself, or any eminence of talent he has expressed that with, but simply because it is his own book; because there is a tone of veracity, an unmistakable air of its being _his_, and a real utterance of a human soul, not a mere echo of such. I consider it, in that sense, highly remarkable, rare, very rare, in these days of ours. Ach Gott! It is frightful to live among echoes. The few that read the book, I imagine, will get benefit of it. To America, I sometimes say that Emerson, such as he is, seems to me like a kind of New Era."
Essays: First Series, passage 1551
[Footnote 685: The Latin proverb says, etc. This is quoted from Tacitus, the famous Roman historian.]
Essays: First Series, passage 140
They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of blood to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and conquer. He lives for us, and we live in him.
Essays: First Series, passage 1516
[Footnote 643: An omnipresent humanity, etc. See what Carlyle has to say on this subject in his _Hero as Poet_.]
Essays: First Series, passage 452
I find very little written directly to the heart of this matter in books. And yet I have one text which I cannot choose but remember. My author says,[300]--"I offer myself faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually am, and tender myself least to him to whom I am the most devoted." I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon.
Essays: First Series, passage 435
8. Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and not for life. They are not to be indulged. This is to weave cobweb, and not cloth. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams,[294] instead of the tough fiber of the human heart. The laws of friendship are great, austere, and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden sweetness.
Essays: First Series, passage 1235
[Footnote 303: This law of one to one. Emerson felt that this same law applied to nature. He wrote in his journal: "Nature says to man, 'one to one, my dear.'"]
Essays: First Series, passage 1381
[Footnote 480: Villegiatura. The Italian name for a season spent in country pleasures.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1131
[Footnote 166: Explore if it be goodness, investigate for himself and see if it be really goodness.
Essays: First Series, passage 1449
[Footnote 564: Boccaccio. An Italian novelist and poet of the fourteenth century. See note on "Italian tales," 539. It is supposed that the plan of the _Decameron_ suggested the similar but far superior plan of Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1172
[Footnote 224: "There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that--to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail." GEORGE ELIOT, _Middlemarch_, lxxvi.]
Essays: First Series, passage 193
This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. _Res nolunt diu male administrari._[104] Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will not convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in.
Essays: First Series, passage 750
12. But the craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to heart. Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters.
Essays: First Series, passage 964
Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past apprehension of truth, and his alert acceptance of it from whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to society, his Christianity, his world, may at any time be superseded and decease.
Essays: First Series, passage 219
They recorded, that when the Thasians[123] erected a statue to Theagenes, a victor in the games, one of his rivals went to it by night, and endeavored to throw it down by repeated blows, until at last he moved it from its pedestal, and was crushed to death beneath its fall.
Essays: First Series, passage 1359
[Footnote 464: Blackmail. What is "blackmail"? How may Christmas gifts, for instance, become a species of blackmail?]
Essays: First Series, passage 225
A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will, or against his will, he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a thread-ball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains in the thrower's bag. Or, rather, it is a harpoon hurled at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a coil of cord in the boat, and if the harpoon is not good, or not well thrown, it will go nigh to cut the steersman in twain, or to sink the boat.
Essays: First Series, passage 1309
[Footnote 397: My contemporaries. Emerson probably had in mind, among others, his friend, the gentle philosopher, Thoreau.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1344
[Footnote 447: She was an elemental force, etc. Of this passage Oliver Wendell Holmes said that Emerson "speaks of woman in language that seems to pant for rhythm and rhyme."]
Essays: First Series, passage 566
The competition is transferred from war to politics and trade, but the personal force appears readily enough in these new arenas.
Essays: First Series, passage 892
We often resolve to give up the care of the weather, but still we regard the clouds and the rain.
Essays: First Series, passage 1073
"And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." _Hamlet_, Act III, Sc. 1.
Essays: First Series, passage 981
Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet may be safer from the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril. In many years neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to me that with every precaution you take against such an evil you put yourself into the power of the evil. I suppose that the highest prudence is the lowest prudence. Is this too sudden a rushing from the centre to the verge of our orbit?
Essays: First Series, passage 771
15. What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that first projectile impulse, of this flattery and balking of so many well-meaning creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe a slight treachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a serious resentment of this use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout, and fools of nature? One looks at the face of heaven and earth lays all petulance at rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions.
Essays: First Series, passage 1444
[Footnote 557: Lydgate. John Lydgate was an English poet who lived a generation later than Chaucer; in his _Troy Book_ and other poems he probably borrowed from the sources used by Chaucer; he called himself "Chaucer's disciple."]
Essays: First Series, passage 257
Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of rectitude must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action, I properly _am_; in a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon. There can be no excess to love; none to knowledge; none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism,[140] never a Pessimism.
Essays: First Series, passage 920
Iron, if kept at the ironmonger's, will rust; beer, if not brewed in the right state of the atmosphere, will sour; timber of ships will rot at sea, or if laid up high and dry, will strain, warp and dry-rot. Money, if kept by us, yields no rent and is liable to loss; if invested, is liable to depreciation of the particular kind of stock. Strike, says the smith, the iron is white. Keep the rake, says the haymaker, as nigh the scythe as you can, and the cart as nigh the rake.
Essays: First Series, passage 127
In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time,--happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.
Essays: First Series, passage 807
7. Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light which is anywhere radiating.
Essays: First Series, passage 577
They are a subtler science of defence to parry and intimidate; but once matched by the skill of the other party, they drop the point of the sword,--points and fences disappear, and the youth finds himself in a more transparent atmosphere, wherein life is a less troublesome game, and not a misunderstanding rises between the players. Manners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of impediments, and bring the man pure to energize.
Essays: First Series, passage 717
5. But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this topic, which school-men called _natura naturata_, or nature passive. One can hardly speak directly of it without excess.
Essays: First Series, passage 177
The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are successful; that justice is not done now. The blindness of the preacher consisted in deferring to the base estimate of the market of what constitutes a manly success, instead of confronting and convicting the world from the truth; announcing the presence of the soul; the omnipotence of the will: and so establishing the standard of good and ill, of success and falsehood.
Essays: First Series, passage 884
The first class have common sense; the second, taste; and the third, spiritual perception. Once in a long time, a man traverses the whole scale, and sees and enjoys the symbol solidly, then also has a clear eye for its beauty, and lastly, whilst he pitches his tent on this sacred volcanic isle of nature, does not offer to build houses and barns thereon reverencing the splendor of the God which he sees bursting through each chink and cranny.
Essays: First Series, passage 222
Still more striking is the expression of this fact in the proverbs of all nations, which are always the literature of reason, or the statements of an absolute truth, without qualification. Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction. And this law of laws which the pulpit, the senate, and the college deny, is hourly preached in all markets and workshops by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as omnipresent as that of birds and flies.
Essays: First Series, passage 163
Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these, but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides. What is the remedy?
Essays: First Series, passage 1052
[Footnote 56: Berserkers. Berserker was a redoubtable hero in Scandinavian mythology, the grandson of the eight-handed Starkodder and the beautiful Alfhilde. He had twelve sons who inherited the wild-battle frenzy, or berserker rage. The sagas, the great Scandinavian epics, are full of stories of heroes who are seized with this fierce longing for battle, murder, and sudden death. The name means bear-shirt and has been connected with the old _were-wolf_ tradition, the myth that certain people were able to change into man-devouring wolves with a wolfish mad desire to rend and kill.]
Essays: First Series, passage 555
But the salt, the dates, the ivory, and the gold, for which these horrible regions are visited, find their way into countries, where the purchaser and consumer can hardly be ranked in one race with these cannibals and man-stealers; countries where man serves himself with metals, wood, stone, glass, gum, cotton, silk and wool; honors himself with architecture;[372] writes laws, and contrives to execute his will through the hands of many nations; and, especially, establishes a select society, running through all the countries of intelligent men, a self-constituted aristocracy, or fraternity of the best, which, without written law, or exact usage of any kind, perpetuates itself, colonizes every new-planted island, and adopts and makes its own whatever personal beauty or extraordinary native endowment anywhere appears.
Essays: First Series, passage 133
Yes, we are the cowed,--we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet[66] and form.
Essays: First Series, passage 362
The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism;[223] and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven. You may fulfill your round of duties by clearing yourself in the _direct_, or in the _reflex_ way.
Essays: First Series, passage 301
But do your work, and I shall know you.[174] Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word?
Essays: First Series, passage 1042
[Footnote 45: Silkworms feed on mulberry-leaves. Emerson describes what science calls "unconscious cerebration."]
Essays: First Series, passage 933
Shuffle they will and crow, crook and hide, feign to confess here, only that they may brag and conquer there, and not a thought has enriched either party, and not an emotion of bravery, modesty, or hope. So neither should you put yourself in a false position to your contemporaries by indulging a vein of hostility and bitterness.
Essays: First Series, passage 657
For, though the bias of her nature was not to thought, but to sympathy, yet was she so perfect in her own nature, as to meet intellectual persons by the fullness of her heart, warming them by her sentiments; believing, as she did, that by dealing nobly with all, all would show themselves noble."
Essays: First Series, passage 597
A circle of men perfectly well-bred would be a company of sensible persons, in which every man's native manners and character appear. If the fashionist have not this quality, he is nothing. We are such lovers of self-reliance, that we excuse in man many sins, if he will show us a complete satisfaction in his position, which asks no leave to be of mine, or any man's good opinion. But any deference to some eminent man or woman of the world, forfeits all privilege of nobility.
Essays: First Series, passage 959
The continual effort to raise himself above himself,[699] to work a pitch above his last height, betrays itself in a man's relations. We thirst for approbation, yet cannot forgive the approver. The sweet of nature is love; yet if I have a friend I am tormented by my imperfections. The love of me accuses the other party. If he were high enough[700] to slight me, then could I love him, and rise by my affection to new heights. A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
Essays: First Series, passage 1343
[Footnote 444: Delphic Sibyl. In ancient mythology, the Sibyls were certain women who possessed the power of prophecy. One of these who made her abode at Delphi in Greece was called the Delphian, or Delphic, sibyl.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1461
[Footnote 579: Milton. Of this great English poet and prose writer of the seventeenth century, Emerson says: "No man can be named whose mind still acts on the cultivated intellect of England and America with an energy comparable to that of Milton. As a poet Shakespeare undoubtedly transcends and far surpasses him in his popularity with foreign nations: but Shakespeare is a voice merely: who and what he was that sang, that sings, we know not."]