Essays: First Series
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1,579 passages indexed from Essays: First Series (Ralph Waldo Emerson) — Page 17 of 32
License: Public Domain
Essays: First Series, passage 250
The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob[139] is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason, and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night.
Essays: First Series, passage 1511
[Footnote 637: Aubrey. John Aubrey, an English antiquarian of the seventeenth century.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1281
[Footnote 360: Sevigné. Marquise de Sevigné was a French author of the seventeenth century.]
Essays: First Series, passage 149
Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class as a mere announcement of the fact that they find themselves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim.
Essays: First Series, passage 659
They have yet to learn that its seeming grandeur is shadowy and relative: it is great by their allowance: its proudest gates will fly open at the approach of their courage and virtue. For the present distress, however, of those who are predisposed to suffer from the tyrannies of this caprice, there are easy remedies. To remove your residence a couple of miles, or at most four, will commonly relieve the most extreme susceptibility.
Essays: First Series, passage 1040
[Footnote 39: Wit is here used in its early sense of intellect, good understanding.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1017
"Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man."
Essays: First Series, passage 642
19. Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good society, there is a narrower and higher circle, concentration of its light, and flower of courtesy, to which there is always a tacit appeal of pride and reference, as to its inner and imperial court, the parliament of love and chivalry. And this is constituted of those persons in whom heroic dispositions are native, with the love of beauty, the delight in society, and the power to embellish the passing day.
Essays: First Series, passage 190
The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President has paid dear for his White House.[101] It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his many attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust[102] before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne. Or, do men desire the more substantial and permanent grandeur of genius? Neither has this an immunity.
Essays: First Series, passage 1108
[Footnote 130: Polycrates, a tyrant of Samos, who was visited with such remarkable prosperity that he was advised by a friend to break the course of it by depriving himself of some valued possession. In accordance with this advice he cast into the sea an emerald ring which he considered his rarest treasure. A few days later a fisherman presented the monarch with a large fish inside of which the ring was found. Soon after this Polycrates fell into the power of an enemy and was nailed to a cross.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1436
[Footnote 544: Wolsey's Soliloquy. See Shakespeare's _Henry VIII._ III, 2. Cardinal Wolsey was prime minister of England in the reign of Henry VIII.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1470
[Footnote 589: Arabian Nights. _The Arabian Nights' Entertainment or A Thousand and One Nights_ is a collection of Oriental tales, the plan and name of which are very ancient.]
Essays: First Series, passage 614
14. The flower of courtesy does not very well bide handling, but if we dare to open another leaf, and explore what parts go to its conformation, we shall find also an intellectual quality. To the leaders of men, the brain as well as the flesh and the heart must furnish a proportion. Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions. Men are too coarsely made for the delicacy of beautiful carriage and customs.
Essays: First Series, passage 937
Let us suck the sweetness of those affections and consuetudes[688] that grow near us. These old shoes are easy to the feet. Undoubtedly we can easily pick faults in our company, can easily whisper names prouder and that tickle the fancy more. Every man's imagination hath its friends; and pleasant would life be with such companions. But if you cannot have them on good mutual terms, you cannot have them.
Essays: First Series, passage 488
24. It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion.
Essays: First Series, passage 316
Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes,[196] I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative.
Essays: First Series, passage 117
I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade,[58] for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.
Essays: First Series, passage 1401
[Footnote 505: Ceres. The Roman goddess of grain and harvest, corresponding to the Greek goddess, Demeter.]
Essays: First Series, passage 946
You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many ages. Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which builds is better than that which is built. The hand that built can topple it down much faster. Better than the hand and nimbler was the invisible thought which wrought through it; and thus ever, behind the coarse effect, is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself the effect of a finer cause. Everything looks permanent until its secret is known.
Essays: First Series, passage 476
Late,--very late,--we perceive that no arrangements, no introductions, no consuetudes or habits of society, would be of any avail to establish us in such relations with them as we desire,--but solely the uprise of nature in us to the same degree it is in them; then shall we meet as water with water; and if we should not meet them then, we shall not want them, for we are already they. In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men.
Essays: First Series, passage 104
The world--this shadow of the soul, or _other me_, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I launch eagerly into this resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct that so shall the dumb abyss[43] be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its fear;[44] I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life.
Essays: First Series, passage 752
The strong, self-complacent Luther[517] declares with an emphasis, not to be mistaken, that "God himself cannot do without wise men." Jacob Behmen[518] and George Fox[519] betray their egotism in the pertinacity of their controversial tracts, and James Naylor[520] once suffered himself to be worshiped as the Christ. Each prophet comes presently to identify himself with his thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred.
Essays: First Series, passage 1123
"For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the soul within." TENNYSON, _In Memoriam_, V. I.
Essays: First Series, passage 1485
[Footnote 605: Tudor dynasty. The English dynasty of sovereigns descended on the male side from Owen Tudor. It began with Henry VII. and ended with Elizabeth.]
Essays: First Series, passage 765
The appearance strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aimless nations. Were the ends of nature so great and cogent, as to exact this immense sacrifice of men?
Essays: First Series, passage 954
In the thought of to-morrow there is a power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of the nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no epic dream has yet depicted. Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.
Essays: First Series, passage 1499
[Footnote 622: Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont: The leading London theaters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1142
"Mobile mutatur semper cum principe vulgus." CLAUDIANUS, _De IV. Consul. Honorii_, 302.
Essays: First Series, passage 1353
[Footnote 457: Into chancery. The phrase "in chancery," means in litigation, as an estate, in a court of equity.]
Essays: First Series, passage 877
29. It must be conceded that these are half-views of half-men. The world still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle with Shakspeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with equal inspiration. For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right is more beautiful than private affection; and love is compatible with universal wisdom.
Essays: First Series, passage 676
In our condition of universal dependence, it seems heroic to let the petitioner[460] be the judge of his necessity, and to give all that is asked, though at great inconvenience. If it be a fantastic desire, it is better to leave to others the office of punishing him.
Essays: First Series, passage 1443
[Footnote 556: Chaucer is a huge borrower. Taine, the French critic, says on this subject: "Chaucer was capable of seeking out in the old common forest of the Middle Ages, stories and legends, to replant them in his own soil and make them send out new shoots.... He has the right and power of copying and translating because by dint of retouching he impresses ... his original work. He recreates what he imitates."]
Essays: First Series, passage 1300
[Footnote 380: God knows, etc. Why is this particularly true of a republic such as the United States?]
Essays: First Series, passage 1528
[Footnote 660: The essay on _Prudence_ was given as a lecture in the course on _Human Culture_, in the winter of 1837-8. It was published in the first series of _Essays_, which appeared in 1841.]
Essays: First Series, passage 464
I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend, than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two before there can be very one.
Essays: First Series, passage 1134
[Footnote 169: Barbadoes, an island in the Atlantic Ocean, one of the Lesser Antilles. The negroes, composing by far the larger part of the population, were formerly slaves.]
Essays: First Series, passage 554
Again, the Bornoos[371] have no proper names; individuals are called after their height, thickness, or other accidental quality, and have nick-names merely.
Essays: First Series, passage 609
13. The complement of this graceful self-respect, and that of all the points of good breeding I most require and insist upon, is deference. I like that every chair should be a throne, and hold a king. I prefer a tendency to stateliness, to an excess of fellowship. Let the incommunicable objects of nature and the metaphysical isolation of man teach us independence. Let us not be too much acquainted.
Essays: First Series, passage 1251
[Footnote 321: Robert Burns. A Scotch lyric poet. Emerson was probably thinking of the patriotic song, _Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled_.]
Essays: First Series, passage 168
The wings of Time are black and white, Pied with morning and with night. Mountain tall and ocean deep Trembling balance duly keep. In changing moon, in tidal wave, Glows the feud of Want and Have. Gauge of more and less through space Electric star and pencil plays. The lonely Earth amid the balls That hurry through the eternal halls, A makeweight flying to the void, Supplemental asteroid, Or compensatory spark, Shoots across the neutral Dark.
Essays: First Series, passage 1133
[Footnote 168: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." _Hamlet_, II. 2.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1562
[Footnote 696: The life of man is a self-evolving circle, etc. "Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence."--EMERSON, in _Nature_.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1125
"Self-respect is the early form in which greatness appears.... Stick to your own.... Follow the path your genius traces like the galaxy of heaven for you to walk in."
Essays: First Series, passage 229
Of the like nature is that expectation of change which instantly follows the suspension of our voluntary activity. The terror of cloudless noon, the emerald of Polycrates,[130] the awe of prosperity, the instinct which leads every generous soul to impose on itself tasks of a noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, are the tremblings of the balance of justice through the heart and mind of man.
Essays: First Series, passage 239
I cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees implicated in those processes with which he is conversant, the stern ethics which sparkle on his chisel edge, which are measured out by his plumb and foot rule, which stand as manifest in the footing of the shop bill as in the history of a state,--do recommend to him his trade, and though seldom named, exalt his business to his imagination.
Essays: First Series, passage 594
There is almost no kind of self-reliance, so it be sane and proportioned, which fashion does not occasionally adopt, and give it the freedom of its saloons. A sainted soul is always elegant, and, if it will, passes unchallenged into the most guarded ring. But so will Jock the teamster pass, in some crisis that brings him thither, and find favor, as long as his head is not giddy with the new circumstance, and the iron shoes do not wish to dance in waltzes and cotillions.
Essays: First Series, passage 1225
[Footnote 290: Elysian temple. Temple of bliss. In Greek mythology, Elysium was the abode of the blessed after death.]
Essays: First Series, passage 344
And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off remembering of the intuition. That thought, by what I can now nearest approach to say it, is this.
Essays: First Series, passage 1067
[Footnote 73: This obscurely constructed sentence means: "For their acquiescence in a political and social inferiority the poor and low find some compensation in the immense moral capacity thereby gained."]
Essays: First Series, passage 683
4. He is a good man, who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming. Some violence, I think, is done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my independence is invaded, or when a gift comes from such as do not know my spirit, and so the act is not supported; and if the gift pleases me overmuch, then I should be ashamed that the donor should read my heart, and see that I love his commodity, and not him.