Essays: First Series
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1,579 passages indexed from Essays: First Series (Ralph Waldo Emerson) — Page 27 of 32
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Essays: First Series, passage 414
3. Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend, and, forthwith, troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words. See in any house where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation which the approach of a stranger causes.
Essays: First Series, passage 900
But the discomfort of unpunctuality, of confusion of thought about facts, inattention to the wants of to-morrow, is of no nation. The beautiful laws of time and space, once dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey it will yield us bees. Our words and actions to be fair must be timely.
Essays: First Series, passage 1045
[Footnote 49: Ferules. According to the methods of education fifty years ago, it was quite customary for the teacher to punish a school-child with his ferule or ruler.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1550
[Footnote 684: Minor virtues. Emerson suggests that punctuality and regard for a promise are two of these. Can you name others?]
Essays: First Series, passage 1011
An example of this is the transformation from the hoof of a horse through the cloven hoofs of the cow to the eventual development of highly expert fingers in the monkey and man. Emerson assumed the doctrine of evolution to be sufficiently established by the anatomical evidence of gradual development. In his own words: "Man is no up-start in the creation.
Essays: First Series, passage 291
A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass?
Essays: First Series, passage 1285
[Footnote 364: Phocion. A Greek general and statesman of the fourth century before Christ who advised the Athenians to make peace with Philip of Macedon. He was put to death on a charge of treason.]
Essays: First Series, passage 120
But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous[61] stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such,--watching days and months sometimes for a few facts; correcting still his old records,--must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside.
Essays: First Series, passage 556
2. What fact more conspicuous in modern history, than the creation of the gentleman? Chivalry[373] is that, and loyalty is that, and, in English literature, half the drama, and all the novels, from Sir Philip Sidney[374] to Sir Walter Scott,[375] paint this figure. The word _gentleman_, which, like the word Christian, must hereafter characterize the present and the few preceding centuries, by the importance attached to it, is a homage to personal and incommunicable properties.
Essays: First Series, passage 604
Everybody we know surrounds himself with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage, and all manner of toys, as screens to interpose between himself and his guests. Does it not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a full renconter front to front with his fellow? It were unmerciful, I know, quite to abolish the use of these screens, which are of eminent convenience, whether the guest is too great, or too little.
Essays: First Series, passage 82
The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions; it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires.[15] Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.
Essays: First Series, passage 701
We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude, and foretell the remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. I think, if we should be rapt away into all that we dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel[473] and Uriel,[474] the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture.
Essays: First Series, passage 1578
[Footnote 714: I own I am gladdened, etc. Emerson always held fast to the consoling thought that there was no evil without good, none out of which Good did not or could not come.]
Essays: First Series, passage 32
".... Not with the Miltons and Grays, not with the Platos and Spinozas, not with the Swifts and Voltaires, not with the Montaignes and Addisons, can we rank Emerson. No man could see this clearer than Emerson himself. 'Alas, my friend,' he writes in reply to Carlyle, who had exhorted him to creative work,--'Alas, my friend, I can do no such gay thing as you say. I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low department of literature,--the reporters; suburban men.' He deprecated his friend's praise; praise 'generous to a fault' he calls it; praise 'generous to the shaming of me,--cold, fastidious, ebbing person that I am.'"
Essays: First Series, passage 519
8. Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, consider the inconvenience of receiving strangers at their fireside, reckon narrowly the loss of time and the unusual display: the soul of a better quality thrusts back the unreasonable economy into the vaults of life, and says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice and the fire he will provide.
Essays: First Series, passage 563
It is beauty which is the aim this time, and not worth. The result is now in question, although our words intimate well enough the popular feeling, that the appearance supposes a substance. The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile either on persons, or opinions, or possessions.
Essays: First Series, passage 894
He must brew, bake, salt and preserve his food. He must pile wood and coal. But as it happens that not one stroke can labor lay to without some new acquaintance with nature; and as nature is inexhaustibly significant, the inhabitants of these climates[667] have always excelled the southerner in force. Such is the value of these matters that a man who knows other things can never know too much of these. Let him have accurate perceptions.
Essays: First Series, passage 1191
[Footnote 248: Gothic, a pointed style of architecture, prevalent in western Europe in the latter part of the middle ages.]
Essays: First Series, passage 996
No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
Essays: First Series, passage 846
17. Hence, though our external history is so meager, yet, with Shakspeare for biographer, instead of Aubrey[637] and Rowe,[638] we have really the information which is material, that which describes character and fortune, that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal with him, would most import us to know.
Essays: First Series, passage 777
We anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon; the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from the seed whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our modern aims and endeavors,--of our condensation and acceleration of objects: but nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's life is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow.
Essays: First Series, passage 875
Had he been less, had he reached only the common measure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso,[652] Cervantes,[653] we might leave the fact in the twilight of human fate: but, that this man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos,--that he should not be wise for himself,--it must even go into the world's history, that the best poet led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement.
Essays: First Series, passage 73
I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun;[10] and, after sunset, Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden.[11] The scholar must needs stand wistful and admiring before this great spectacle. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him?
Essays: First Series, passage 704
My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on the skirt of the village.[476] But I go with my friend[477] to the shore of our little river,[478] and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation.[479] We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty: we dip our hands in this painted element: our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms.
Essays: First Series, passage 80
Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself,"[14] and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.
Essays: First Series, passage 1494
[Footnote 616: Coleridge. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an English poet, author of critical lectures and notes on Shakespeare.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1043
[Footnote 46: Ripe fruit. Emerson's ripe fruit found its way into his diary, where it lay until he needed it in the preparation of some lecture or essay.]
Essays: First Series, passage 402
The great genius returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon[273] conquered Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked valor, and disencumbering it of all aids.
Essays: First Series, passage 599
"If you could see Vich Ian Vohr with his tail on![411]--" But Vich Ian Vohr must always carry his belongings in some fashion, if not added as honor, then severed as disgrace.
Essays: First Series, passage 134
Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the world who give the color of their present thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men, by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great thing. Wherever Macdonald[67] sits, there is the head of the table.
Essays: First Series, passage 324
Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these.
Essays: First Series, passage 107
The actions and events of our childhood and youth are now matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so with our recent actions,--with the business which we now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know it than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of life,--remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life.
Essays: First Series, passage 1083
[Footnote 90: Edward Gibbon (1737-1794). One of the most distinguished of English historians. His great work is the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Carlyle called Gibbon, "the splendid bridge from the old world to the new."]
Essays: First Series, passage 214
A plain confession of the in-working of the All, and of its moral aim. The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics; and it would seem impossible for any fable to be invented to get any currency which was not moral. Aurora[117] forgot to ask youth for her lover, and though Tithonus is immortal, he is old, Achilles[118] is not quite invulnerable; the sacred waters did not wash the heel by which Thetis held him.
Essays: First Series, passage 397
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva[261] watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac[262] he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky.
Essays: First Series, passage 1545
[Footnote 679: Cæsar. Why is Cæsar the great Roman ruler, given as a type of greatness?]
Essays: First Series, passage 332
Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.
Essays: First Series, passage 535
13. We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men, who never ripened, or whose performance in actual life was not extraordinary. When we see their air and mien, when we hear them speak of society, or books, or religion, we admire their superiority; they seem to throw contempt on our entire polity and social state; theirs is the tone of a youthful giant, who is sent to work revolutions. But they enter an active profession, and the forming Colossus[358] shrinks to the common size of man.
Essays: First Series, passage 276
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts:[152] they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when[153] the whole cry of voices is on the other side.
Essays: First Series, passage 493
The Roman Martius has conquered Athens--all but the invincible spirits of Sophocles, the duke of Athens, and Dorigen, his wife. The beauty of the latter inflames Martius, and he seeks to save her husband; but Sophocles will not ask his life, although assured, that a word will save him, and the execution of both proceeds.
Essays: First Series, passage 1543
[Footnote 676: Goethe's Tasso. A play by the German poet Goethe, founded on the belief that the imprisonment of Tasso was due to his aspiration to the hand of Leonora d'Este, sister of the duke of Ferrara. Tasso was a famous Italian poet of the seventeenth century.]
Essays: First Series, passage 409
It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee.
Essays: First Series, passage 1527
[Footnote 659: With doomsdays and purgatorial, etc. As described by Dante in his _Divine Commedia_, an epic about hell, purgatory, and paradise.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1445
[Footnote 558: Caxton. William Caxton, the English author, more famous as the first English printer, was not born until after Chaucer's death. The work from which Emerson supposes the poet to have borrowed Caxton's translation of _Recueil des Histoires de Troye_, the first printed English book, appeared about 1474.]
Essays: First Series, passage 1573
[Footnote 709: Ariosto. A famous Italian author of the sixteenth century, who wrote comedies, satires, and a metrical romance, _Orlando Furioso_.]
Essays: First Series, passage 860
This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers.
Essays: First Series, passage 498
_Mar._ Strike, strike, Valerius, Or Martius' heart will leap out at his mouth: This is a man, a woman! Kiss thy lord, And live with all the freedom you were wont. O love! thou doubly hast afflicted me With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart, My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn, Ere thou transgress this knot of piety.
Essays: First Series, passage 645
Certainly, kings and queens, nobles and great ladies, had some right to complain of the absurdity that had been put in their mouths, before the days of Waverley;[439] but neither does Scott's dialogue bear criticism. His lords brave each other in smart epigrammatic speeches, but the dialogue is in costume, and does not please on the second reading; it is not warm with life.
Essays: First Series, passage 948
Nature looks provokingly stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the rest; and when once I comprehend that, will these fields stretch so immovably wide, these leaves hang so individually considerable? Permanence is a word of degrees. Every thing is medial. Moons are no more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.
Essays: First Series, passage 1473
[Footnote 592: Robin Hood. The ballads about Robin Hood, an English outlaw and popular hero of the twelfth century.]