Essays: First Series
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1,579 passages indexed from Essays: First Series (Ralph Waldo Emerson) — Page 13 of 32
License: Public Domain
Essays: First Series, passage 748
Let the Stoics[516] say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity, that, at least, one may replace the parent.
Essays: First Series, passage 853
But it turns out, that what he has to say is of that weight, as to withdraw some attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasion which gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial, compared with the universality of its application.
Essays: First Series, passage 394
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.
Essays: First Series, passage 326
That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane,[206] owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.
Essays: First Series, passage 1044
[Footnote 48: Empyrean. The region of pure light and fire; the ninth heaven of ancient astronomy.
Essays: First Series, passage 274
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius.[148] Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense;[149] for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,--and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.
Essays: First Series, passage 833
Now, literature, philosophy, and thought, are Shakspearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge[616] and Goethe[617] are the only critics who have expressed our convictions with any adequate fidelity; but there is in all cultivated minds a silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which, like Christianity, qualifies the period.
Essays: First Series, passage 1282
[Footnote 361: De Staël. Madame de Staël was a French writer whose books and political opinions were condemned by Napoleon.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1299
[Footnote 379: Feudal Ages. The Middle Ages in Europe during which the feudal system prevailed. According to this, land was held by its owners on condition of certain duties, especially military service, performed for a superior lord.]
Essays: First Series, passage 534
The pictures which fill the imagination in reading the actions of Pericles,[352] Xenophon,[353] Columbus,[354] Bayard,[355] Sidney,[356] Hampden,[357] teach us how needlessly mean our life is, that we, by the depth of our living, should deck it with more than regal or national splendor, and act on principles that should interest man and nature in the length of our days.
Essays: First Series, passage 1274
[Footnote 352: Pericles. A famous Greek statesman of the fifth century before Christ, in whose age Athens was preëminent in naval and military affairs and in letters and art.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1450
[Footnote 565: Provençal poets. The poets of Provençe, a province of the southeastern part of France. In the Middle Ages it was celebrated for its lyric poets, called troubadours.]
Essays: First Series, passage 711
To the poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society; he is loyal; he respects the rich; they are rich for the sake of his imagination; how poor his fancy would be, if they were not rich!
Essays: First Series, passage 713
The muse herself betrays her son, and enhances the gift of wealthy and well-born beauty, by a radiation out of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the road,--a certain haughty favor, as if from patrician genii to patricians, a kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of the air.
Essays: First Series, passage 62
I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength[1] or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours;[2] nor for the advancement of science, like our co-temporaries in the British and European capitals.
Essays: First Series, passage 1567
[Footnote 702: Berkeley. George Berkeley was a British clergyman of the eighteenth century. He was the author of works on philosophy which are marked by extreme subjective idealism.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1170
[Footnote 219: Thor and Woden. Woden or Odin was the chief god of Scandinavian mythology. Thor, his elder son, was the god of thunder. From these names come the names of the days Wednesday and Thursday.]
Essays: First Series, passage 418
Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension, are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress, and the dinner, but the throbbing of the heart, and the communications of the soul, no more.
Essays: First Series, passage 1109
[Footnote 131: Scot and lot, "formerly, a parish assessment laid on subjects according to their ability. Now, a phrase for obligations of every kind regarded collectively." (Webster.)]
Essays: First Series, passage 19
Emerson was always a striking figure in the intellectual life of America. His discourses were above all things inspiring. Through them many were induced to strive for a higher self-culture. His influence can be discerned in all the literary movements of the time. He was the central figure of the so-called transcendental school which was so prominent fifty years ago, although he always rather held aloof from any enthusiastic participation in the movement.
Essays: First Series, passage 971
The facts which loomed so large in the fogs of yesterday,--property, climate, breeding, personal beauty and the like, have strangely changed their proportions. All that we reckoned settled shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities, climates, religions, leave their foundations and dance before our eyes. And yet here again see the swift circumscription! Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it.
Essays: First Series, passage 69
But, unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk and strut about so many walking monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.
Essays: First Series, passage 874
It is but a Twelfth Night,[650] or Midsummer Night's Dream, or a Winter Evening's Tale: what signifies another picture more or less? The Egyptian verdict[651] of the Shakspeare Societies comes to mind, that he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast.
Essays: First Series, passage 886
But culture, revealing the high origin of the apparent world and aiming at the perfection of the man as the end, degrades everything else, as health and bodily life, into means. It sees prudence not to be a several faculty, but a name for wisdom and virtue conversing with the body and its wants.
Essays: First Series, passage 180
If a man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the divine laws, he is answered by a silence which conveys well enough to an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to make his own statement.
Essays: First Series, passage 819
The Liturgy,[582] admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the Catholic church,--these collected, too, in long periods, from the prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred writer all over the world.
Essays: First Series, passage 1232
[Footnote 298: I knew a man who, etc. The allusion is to Jonas Very, a mystic and poet, who lived at Salem, Massachusetts.]
Essays: First Series, passage 246
When he is punished, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill. The wise man throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point. The wound cicatrizes and falls off from him like a dead skin, and when they would triumph, lo! he has passed on invulnerable.
Essays: First Series, passage 268
And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.
Essays: First Series, passage 1066
[Footnote 72: Emerson frequently omits the principal verb of his sentences as here: "In a century _there may exist_ one or two men."]
Essays: First Series, passage 296
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man _and_ his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world,--as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live.
Essays: First Series, passage 565
In times of violence, every eminent person must fall in with many opportunities to approve his stoutness and worth; therefore every man's name that emerged at all from the mass in the feudal ages,[379] rattles in our ear like a flourish of trumpets. But personal force never goes out of fashion. That is still paramount to-day, and, in the moving crowd of good society, the men of valor and reality are known, and rise to their natural place.
Essays: First Series, passage 1406
[Footnote 514: The astronomers said, etc. Beginning with this passage, several pages of this essay was published in 1844, under the title of _Tantalus_, in the next to the last number of _The Dial_, which Emerson edited.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1187
"Vain, very vain, my weary search to find That bliss which only centers in the mind.... Still to ourselves in every place consign'd, Our own felicity we make or find." GOLDSMITH (and JOHNSON), _The Traveler_, 423-32.
Essays: First Series, passage 321
Ordinarily, everybody in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design;--and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients.
Essays: First Series, passage 146
But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say of nearer reference to the time and to this country.
Essays: First Series, passage 625
A tradesman who had long dunned him for a note of three hundred guineas, found him one day counting gold, and demanded payment. "No," said Fox, "I owe this money to Sheridan[430]: it is a debt of honor: if an accident should happen to me, he has nothing to show." "Then," said the creditor, "I change my debt into a debt of honor," and tore the note in pieces.
Essays: First Series, passage 247
Blame is safer than praise. I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies. In general, every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
Essays: First Series, passage 366
We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force,[224] and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.
Essays: First Series, passage 544
16. To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to live with some rigor of temperance, or some extremes of generosity, seems to be an asceticism which common good-nature would appoint to those who are at ease and in plenty, in sign that they feel a brotherhood with the great multitude of suffering men. And not only need we breathe and exercise the soul by assuming the penalties of abstinence, of debt, of solitude, of unpopularity, but it behooves the wise man to look with a bold eye into those rarer dangers which sometimes invade men, and to familiarize himself with disgusting forms of disease, with sounds of execration, and the vision of violent death.
Essays: First Series, passage 1097
[Footnote 116: Minerva, goddess of wisdom, who sprang full-armed from the brain of Jupiter. The secret which she held is told in the following lines.]
Essays: First Series, passage 640
The persons who constitute the natural aristocracy, are not found in the actual aristocracy, or only on its edge; as the chemical energy of the spectrum is found to be greatest just outside of the spectrum. Yet that is the infirmity of the seneschals, who do not know their sovereign, when he appears. The theory of society supposes the existence and sovereignty of these. It divines afar off their coming. It says with the elder gods,--
Essays: First Series, passage 1267
[Footnote 341: Philippi. A city of Macedonia near which in the year 42 B.C. were fought two battles in which the republican army under Brutus and Cassius was defeated by Octavius and Antony, friends of Cæsar.]
Essays: First Series, passage 71
In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is _Man Thinking_. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
Essays: First Series, passage 982
Think how many times we shall fall back into pitiful calculations before we take up our rest in the great sentiment, or make the verge of to-day the new centre. Besides, your bravest sentiment is familiar to the humblest men. The poor and the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. "Blessed be nothing" and "The worse things are, the better they are" are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.
Essays: First Series, passage 1433
[Footnote 541: Prestige. Can you give an English equivalent for this French word?]
Essays: First Series, passage 1325
[Footnote 418: Cardinal Caprara. An Italian cardinal, Bishop of Milan, who negotiated the famous concordat of 1801, an agreement between the Church and State regulating the relations between civil and ecclesiastical powers.]
Essays: First Series, passage 113
But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than books, is that it is a resource. That great principle of Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and, as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity,--these "fits of easy transmission and reflection," as Newton[53] called them, are the law of nature because they are the law of spirit.
Essays: First Series, passage 479
We may congratulate ourselves that the period of nonage,[305] of follies, of blunders, and of shame, is passed in solitude, and when we are finished men, we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends. By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you gain the great.
Essays: First Series, passage 952
Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general law only a particular fact of some more general law presently to disclose itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The man finishes his story,--how good! how final! how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo, on the other side rises also a man and draws a circle around the circle we had just pronounced the outline of the sphere.