Essays: First Series
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1,579 passages indexed from Essays: First Series (Ralph Waldo Emerson) — Page 20 of 32
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Essays: First Series, passage 329
The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax,[211] without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear?
Essays: First Series, passage 1318
[Footnote 410: Coventry. It is said that the people of Coventry, a city in England, at one time so disliked soldiers that to send a military man there meant to exclude him from social intercourse; hence the expression "to send to Coventry" means to exclude from society.]
Essays: First Series, passage 613
The compliments and ceremonies of our breeding should recall,[425] however remotely, the grandeur of our destiny.
Essays: First Series, passage 978
Has the naturalist or chemist learned his craft, who has explored the gravity of atoms and the elective affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is only a partial or approximate statement, namely that like draws to like, and that the goods which belong to you gravitate to you and need not be pursued with pains and cost? Yet is that statement approximate also, and not final. Omnipresence is a higher fact.
Essays: First Series, passage 724
Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; psychology, mesmerism (with intent to show where our spoons are gone); and anatomy and physiology become phrenology and palmistry.
Essays: First Series, passage 483
seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each other's, because we are more our own? A friend is Janus-faced:[306] he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger[307] of a greater friend.
Essays: First Series, passage 936
Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or men on an unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited for some better sympathy and intimacy to come. But whence and when? To-morrow will be like to-day. Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live. Our friends and fellow-workers die off from us. Scarcely can we say we see new men, new women, approaching us. We are too old to regard fashion, too old to expect patronage of any greater or more powerful.
Essays: First Series, passage 1003
"A man," said Oliver Cromwell,[716] "never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going." Dreams and drunkenness, the use of opium and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction for men. For the like reason they ask the aid of wild passions, as in the gaming and war, ape in some manner these flames and generosities of the heart.
Essays: First Series, passage 1178
[Footnote 235: Lavoisier (1743-1794), celebrated French chemical philosopher, discoverer of the composition of water.]
Essays: First Series, passage 378
If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke,[234] a Lavoisier,[235] a Hutton,[236] a Betham,[237] a Fourier,[238] it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the number of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency.
Essays: First Series, passage 1481
[Footnote 601: Essexes. Walter Devereux was a brave English gentleman whom Elizabeth made Earl of Essex in 1572. His son Robert, the second Earl of Essex, was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth's.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1462
[Footnote 580: Delphi. Here, source of prophecy. Delphi was a city in Greece, where was the oracle of Apollo, the most famous of the oracles of antiquity.]
Essays: First Series, passage 852
Had he been less, we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how good a dramatist he was,--and he is the best in the world.
Essays: First Series, passage 653
But besides those who make good in our imagination the place of muses and of Delphic Sibyls,[444] are there not women who fill our vase with wine and roses to the brim, so that the wine runs over and fills the house with perfume; who inspire us with courtesy; who unloose our tongues, and we speak; who anoint our eyes, and we see?
Essays: First Series, passage 226
You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. "No man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him," said Burke.[127] The exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he excludes himself from enjoyment in the attempt to appropriate it. The exclusionist in religion does not see that he shuts the door of heaven on himself, in striving to shut out others. Treat men as pawns[128] and ninepins, and you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their heart, you shall lose your own. The senses would make things of all persons; of women, of children, of the poor. The vulgar proverb, "I will get it from his purse or get it from his skin," is sound philosophy.
Essays: First Series, passage 1091
[Footnote 101: White House, the popular name of the presidential mansion at Washington.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1483
[Footnote 603: Burleighs or Burghleys: William Cecil, baron of Burghley, was an English statesman, who, for forty years, was Elizabeth's chief minister.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1334
[Footnote 432: Captain Symmes. The only real personage of this group. He asserted that there was an opening to the interior of the earth which was stocked with plants and animals.]
Essays: First Series, passage 883
There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. It is sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three. One class lives to the utility of the symbol, esteeming health and wealth a final good. Another class live above this mark of the beauty of the symbol, as the poet and artist and the naturalist and man of science. A third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified; these are wise men.
Essays: First Series, passage 695
The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom.
Essays: First Series, passage 398
The solstice[263] he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue.
Essays: First Series, passage 1117
[Footnote 148: Genius. See the paragraph on genius in Emerson's lecture on _The Method of Nature_, one sentence of which runs: "Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within, going abroad only for audience, and spectator."]
Essays: First Series, passage 658
21. I know that this Byzantine[448] pile of chivalry of Fashion, which seems so fair and picturesque to those who look at the contemporary facts for science or for entertainment, is not equally pleasant to all spectators. The constitution of our society makes it a giant's castle to the ambitious youth who have not found their names enrolled in its Golden Book,[449] and whom it has excluded from its coveted honors and privileges.
Essays: First Series, passage 827
A popular player,--nobody suspected he was the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual men, as from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon,[606] who took the inventory of the human understanding for his times, never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson,[607] though we have strained his few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was attempting.
Essays: First Series, passage 167
We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. Then shall man be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defense and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.
Essays: First Series, passage 499
_Dor._ O star of Rome! what gratitude can speak Fit words to follow such a deed as this?
Essays: First Series, passage 1218
[Footnote 282: Bard. Poet: originally one who composed and sang to the music of a harp verses in honor of heroes and heroic deeds.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1030
[Footnote 30: Emerson is continually stimulating us to look at things in new ways. Here, for instance, at once the thought comes: "Is it not perhaps possible that the transcendent genius of Shakespeare has been rather noxious than beneficent in its influence on the mind of the world? Has not the all-pervading Shakespearian influence flooded and drowned out a great deal of original genius?"]
Essays: First Series, passage 1398
[Footnote 502: Ptolemaic schemes. The system of geography and astronomy taught in the second century by Ptolemy of Alexandria; it was accepted till the sixteenth century, when the Copernican system was established. Ptolemy believed that the sun, planets, and stars revolve around the earth; Copernicus taught that the planets revolve around the sun.]
Essays: First Series, passage 902
The last Grand Duke of Weimar,[671] a man of superior understanding, said: "I have sometimes remarked in the presence of great works of art, and just now especially in Dresden, how much a certain property contributes to the effect which gives life to the figures, and to the life an irresistible truth. This property is the hitting, in all the figures we draw, the right centre of gravity.
Essays: First Series, passage 337
If, therefore, a man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old moldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being?[212] Whence, then, this worship of the past?[213] The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.
Essays: First Series, passage 346
In the hour of vision, there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea,--long intervals of time, years, centuries,--are of no account.
Essays: First Series, passage 1514
[Footnote 641: Antonio. The Venetian Merchant in Shakespeare's play, _The Merchant of Venice_.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1544
[Footnote 677: Richard III. An English king, the last of the Plantagenet line, the hero--or villain--of Shakespeare's historical play, Richard III.]
Essays: First Series, passage 898
Herein he tastes an old joy of youth and childhood, the cat-like love of garrets, presses and corn-chambers, and of the conveniences of long housekeeping. His garden or his poultry-yard--very paltry places it may be--tells him many pleasant anecdotes. One might find argument for optimism in the abundant flow of this saccharine element of pleasure in every suburb and extremity of the good world. Let a man keep the law--any law,--and his way will be strown with satisfactions.
Essays: First Series, passage 139
The poor and the low find some amends to their immense moral capacity, for their acquiescence in a political and social inferiority.[73] They are content to be brushed like flies from the path of a great person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They sun themselves in the great man's light, and feel it to be their own element.
Essays: First Series, passage 652
The wonderful generosity of her sentiments raises her at times into heroical and godlike regions, and verifies the pictures of Minerva,[441] Juno,[442] or Polymnia;[443] and, by the firmness with which she treads her upward path, she convinces the coarsest calculators that another road exists than that which their feet know.
Essays: First Series, passage 983
One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly; as one beholds the same objects from a higher point of view. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor?
Essays: First Series, passage 1451
[Footnote 566: Romaunt of the Rose, etc. Chaucer's _Romaunt of the Rose_, written during the period of French influence, is an incomplete and abbreviated translation of a French poem of the thirteenth century, _Roman de la Rose_, the first part of which was written by William of Loris and the latter by John of Meung, or Jean de Meung.]
Essays: First Series, passage 115
He can still fall back on this elemental force of living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. Let the grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof. Those "far from fame," who dwell and act with him, will feel the force of his constitution in the doings and passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public and designed display. Time shall teach him that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives.
Essays: First Series, passage 679
But it is a cold lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy me something which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's. That is fit for kings, and rich men who represent kings, and a false state of property, to make presents of gold and silver stuffs, as a kind of symbolical sin-offering,[463] or payment of blackmail.[464]
Essays: First Series, passage 1158
[Footnote 204: Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846), English philanthropist and abolitionist.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1463
[Footnote 581: Our English Bible. The version made in the reign of King James I. by forty-seven learned divines is a monument of noble English.]
Essays: First Series, passage 651
Certainly, let her be as much better placed in the laws and in social forms, as the most zealous reformer can ask, but I confide so entirely in her inspiring and musical nature, that I believe only herself can show us how she shall be served.
Essays: First Series, passage 1237
[Footnote 306: Janus-faced. The word here means simply two-faced, without the idea of deceit usually attached to it. In Roman mythology, Janus, the doorkeeper of heaven was the protector of doors and gateways and the patron of the beginning and end of undertakings. He was the god of the rising and setting of the sun, and was represented with two faces, one looking to the east and the other to the west. His temple at Rome was kept open in time of war and closed in time of peace.]
Essays: First Series, passage 197
Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny.
Essays: First Series, passage 1521
[Footnote 650: Twelfth Night, etc. The names of three bright, merry, or serene plays by Shakespeare.]
Essays: First Series, passage 963
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and morals of mankind are all at the mercy of a new generalization. Generalization is always a new influx of the divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill that attends it.
Essays: First Series, passage 57
"But 'sweetness and light' are precious and inspiring only so far as they express the essential sweetness of the disposition of the thinker, and the essential illuminating power of his intelligence. Emerson's greatness came from his character. Sweetness and light streamed from him because they were _in_ him. In everything he thought, wrote, and did, we feel the presence of a personality as vigorous and brave as it was sweet, and the particular radical thought he at any time expressed derived its power to animate and illuminate other minds from the might of the manhood, which was felt to be within and behind it. To 'sweetness and light' he therefore added the prime quality of fearless manliness.
Essays: First Series, passage 956
Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact look crass[698] and material, threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not; it goes to refine and raise thy theory of matter just as much.