Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotations

RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)
Let the glory of the world go where it will, the mind has its own glory. what it doth, endures. No
man can serve many masters. And often the choice is not given you between greatness
in the world and greatness of soul which you will choose, but both advantages are not
compatible. The night is fine; the stars shed down their severe influences upon me and I
feel a joy in my solitude that the merriment of vulgar society can never communicate.
There is a pleasure in the thought that the particular tone of my mind at this moment
may be new in the Universe; that the emotions of this hour may be peculiar and
unexampled in the whole eternity of moral being. I lead a new life. I occupy new
ground in the world of spirits, untenanted before. I commerce a career of thought and
action which is expanding before me into a distant and dazzling infinity. Strange
thoughts start up like angels in my way and beckon me onward. I doubt not I tread on
the highway that leads to the Divinity. And why shall I not be content with these
thoughts and this being which give a majesty to my nature and forego the ambition to
shine in the frivolous assemblies of men where the genuine objects of my ambition are
not revered or known?
Emerson, Journal entry, January 1827
Looking at God instantly reduces our disposition to dissent from our brother. A man may die by a
fever as well as by consumption, and religion is as effectually destroyed by bigotry as
by indifference.
Emerson
Every Sunday ever since they were born this congregation have heard tell of salvation, and of
going to the door of Heaven and knocking, and being answered from within, "Depart, I
never knew you," and of being sent away to eternal ruin. What hinders that, instead of
this parable, the naked fact be stated to them? namely that as long [as] they offend
against their conscience they will seek to be happy, but they shall not be able, they shall
not come to any true knowledge of God, they shall be avoided by good and wise men,
they shall become worse and worse.
Emerson, Journal Entry, October 10, 1833
An impulse as irresistible as is the acorn to germinate is in the soul of the prophet to speak.
By going much alone a man will get more of a noble courage in thought and word than from all
the wisdom that is in books. He will come to hear God speak as audibly through his
own lips as ever He did by the mouth of Moses or Isaiah or Milton.
I found when I had finished my new lecture that it was a very good house, only the architect had
unfortunately omitted the stairs.
Emerson, Journal Entry, December 18, 1850
It seems to me that the perspective of time, as it sets everything in the right point of view, does
the same by Christianity. We learn to look at it now as a part of the history of the world,
to see how it rests in the broad basis of man's moral nature, and is not itself that basis. I
cannot but think that Jesus Christ will be better loved by being less adored. He has had
an unnatural, an artificial place for ages in human opinions a place too high for love.
There is a recoil of the affections from all authority and force. To the barbarous state of
society it was thought to add to the dignity of Christ to make him king, to make him
God. Now that the scriptures are read with purged eyes, it is seen that he is only to be
loved for so much goodness and wisdom as was in him, which are the only things for
which a sound human mind can love any person. As the world waxes wiser, he will be
more truly venerated for the splendor of the contrast of his character to the opinions and
practices of his age, he will attract the unfeigned love of all to whom moral nature is
dear because he planted himself in the face of the world upon that sole ground,
showing that noble confidence in the reality and superiority of spiritual truths,
that simplicity and at the same time enthusiasm in declaring them which is itself
one of the highest merits and gives confidence to all thinkers that come after.
Bacon said man is the minister and interpreter of nature: he is so in more respects than one. He is
not only to explain the sense of each passage, but the scope and argument of the whole
book.
Emerson, Journal Entry, November 1, 1833
The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals
of time. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but
privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly
operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth
which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style
of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of
character.
Emerson, Compensation
He is a poor writer who does not teach courage of treatment.

Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks., Volume 1, p. 376
Nature herself was in a hurry with these hasters and never finished one.
Emerson, describing the American, Journal entry, June 27, 1847
If the single man plants himself indomitably upon his instincts, and there abides, the huge world
will come round to him.
Emerson, quoted in Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason
Let not a man guard his dignity, but let his dignity guard him.
Emerson
Let us treat the men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, cited in A Little Book of Aphorisms (New York: 1947), p. 102
When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the
cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.
Emerson, Journals, 1824
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Emerson
The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

Emerson
The only way to have a friend is to be one.

Emerson
The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness; a non
performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is
giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it
announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.
Emerson
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a
happy quotation than in the poem.
Emerson
Be not the slave of your own past.

Emerson
Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
Emerson
Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.
Emerson
As we grow old the beauty steals inward.

Emerson
It is one of the felicities of literary history, the tie which inseparably couples these two names
[Montaigne and Plutarch] across fourteen centuries. Montaigne, whilst he grasps
tienne de la Botie with one hand, reaches back the other to Plutarch. These distant
friendships charm us, and honor all the parties, and make the best example of the
universal citizenship and fraternity of the human mind.
Emerson, Introduction to Plutarchs Moralia
The plain-speaking of Plutarch, as of the ancient writers generally, coming from the habit of
writing for one sex only, has a great gain for brevity, and, in our new tendencies of
civilization, may tend to correct a false delicacy.
Emerson, Introduction to Plutarchs Moralia
If Homer is that man he is taken for, he has not yet done his office when he has educated the
learned of Europe for a thousand years. He is now to approve himself a master of
delight to me also. If he cannot do that, all his fame shall avail him nothing.
Emerson, The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1964), Volume 2, p. 260
I have reached the middle age of man; yet I believe I am not less glad or sanguine at the meeting
of scholars, than when, a boy, I first saw the graduates of my own College assembled at
their anniversary. Neither years nor books have yet availed to extirpate a prejudice then
rooted in me, that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and earth, the excellency of his
country, the happiest of men. His duties lead him directly into the holy ground where
other men's aspirations only point.
Emerson, Literary Ethics
Things must take my scale, not I theirs.

The resources of the scholar are co-extensive with nature and truth, yet can never be his, unless
claimed by him with an equal greatness of mind. He cannot know them until he has
beheld with awe the infinitude and impersonality of the intellectual power. When he has
seen, that it is not his, nor any man's, but that it is the soul which made the world, and
that it is all accessible to him, he will know that he, as its minister, may rightfully hold
all things subordinate and answerable to it.
The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man
can be and do.
Plotinus too, and Spinoza, and the immortal bards of philosophy, that which they have written
out with patient courage, makes me bold. No more will I dismiss, with haste, the visions
which flash and sparkle across my sky; but observe them, approach them, domesticate
them, brood on them, and draw out of the past, genuine life for the present hour.
Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.

The vision of genius comes by renouncing the too officious activity of the understanding, and
giving leave and amplest privilege to the spontaneous sentiment. Out of this must all
that is alive and genial in thought go. Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and
nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a
spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, all flock to their
aid.
Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson (1890)

http://books.google.com/books?id=SEFIAAAAIAAJ
The moment you putty and plaster your expressions to make them hang together, you have begun
a weakening process. Take it for granted the truths will harmonize; and as for the
falsities and mistakes, they will speedily die of themselves.
Emerson in conversation, as reported by Charles J. Woodbury, Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson (1890), p. 23
You must know about ownership in facts. What another sees and tells you is not yours, but his.
There is a great secret in knowing what to keep out of the mind as well as what to put in.
You cannot make too much of yourself. It is all there is of you. How many do you know who
are made up mainly of fragments of others? But follow your own star, and it will
lead you to that which none other can attain. Imitation is suicide. You must take
yourself for better or for worse as your portion. A man can only get an extemporized
half-possession of another's gift; and what came wholly natural from him has, in
spite of the best grace and skill, an impertinent air from the borrower.
I commiserate any one who is subject to the misery of being overplaced. What he is stands over
him and thunders, and denies what he says.
Yield not one inch to all the forces which conspire to make you an echo. That is the sin of
dogmatism and creeds. Avoid them; they build a fence about the intellect .
Journals
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The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they
say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.
Emerson, Journal entry May 24, 1847
When I see my friend after a long time, my first question is, Has anything become clear to you?
At the Opera I think I see the fine gates open which are at all times closed, and that to-morrow I
shall find free and varied expression. But to-morrow I am mute as yesterday.
Expression is all we want: not knowledge, but vent: we know enough; but have not leaves and
lungs enough for a healthy perspiration and growth.
Our virtues, too, are in conspiracy against grandeur, and are narrowing.
In Carlyle, as in Byron, one is more struck with the rhetoric than with the matter. He has manly
superiority rather than intellectuality, and so makes good hard hits all the time. There is
more character than intellect in every sentence, herein strongly resembling Samuel
Johnson.
My only secret was that all men were my masters; I never saw one who was not my superior, and
I would so gladly have been his apprentice if his craft had been communicable.
Eager, solicitous, hungry, rabid, busy-bodied America attempting many things, vain, ambitious to
feel thy own existence, and convince others of thy talent, by attempting and hastily
accomplishing much; yes, catch thy breath and correct thyself, and failing here, prosper
out there; speed and fever are never greatness; but reliance and serenity and waiting.
It seems often as if rejection, sturdy rejection were for us: choose well your part, stand fast by
your task, and let all else go to ruin if it will. Then instantly the malicious world
changes itself into one wide snare or temptation,escape it who can.
Worship of the dollar. ... Channing proposed that there should be a magnified dollar, say as big as
a barrel-head, made of silver or gold, in each village
I cannot live as you do. It is only by a most exact husbandry of my resources that I am anybody.
You shall not tell me that your house is of importance in the commercial world. You shall not tell
me that you have learned to know men. You shall make me feel that. Else your
saying so unsays it.
Emerson, Journal
You shall not tell me what books you have read by naming their titles, but only through
showing me your better information and richer thought.
Emerson, Journal
Conformity is the ape of harmony.

Emerson, Journal Entry, May 10, 1840
You must never lose sight of the purpose of helping a particular person in every word you say.
Emerson, Journal entry dated December 28, 1834 (ISBN 1408607255, p. 420)
A critic pronounced that Wordsworth was a good man, but no poet. Ah! said one present, you
know not how much poetry there is in goodness!
Emerson, Journal entry dated December 29, 1834 (ISBN 1408607255, p. 421)
Every man's Reason is sufficient for his guidance, if used.

Emerson, Journal entry December 8, 1834, Journals (1911), Volume 3, p. 389
Because God has made you capable of Reason, therefore must I hear and accept all your selfish
railing, your proven falsehoods, your unconsidered guesses as truth? No; I appeal from
you to your Reason, which, with me, condemns you. ... It amounts to this: Every man's
Reason can show him what is right. Therefore every man says what is right, whether he
use his Reason or no. I hate this fallacy the more that it is, beside being dire nonsense,
a profanation of the dearest truths.
Emerson, Journal entry December 8, 1834, Journals (1911), Volume 3, pp. 389-390, ellipsis in original
Democracy, Freedom, has its root in the sacred truth that every man hath in him the divine
Reason, or that, though few men since the creation of the world live according to the
dictates of Reason, yet all men are created capable of so doing. That is the equality and
the only equality of all men.
Whosoever therefore apprehends the infinite,and every man can,brings all worth and
significance into that spot of space where he stands, though it be a ditch, a potato-field,
a work-bench. ... And therefore also is it that every good sentence seems to imply all
truth.
Emerson, Journal entry December 22, 1834, Journals (1911), Volume 3, pp. 402-403
Once read, he is but half read.

Emerson, describing reading Carlyle, Journal entry dated March 19, 1837, Journals (1911), Volume 4, p. 193
You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.
Emerson, Journals (1911), Volume 4, p.282
It takes a great deal of elevation of thought to produce a very little elevation of life.
Emerson, Journal Entry, May 5, 1838, Journals (1910), vol. 4, p. 441
We do not see that what we call Church, State, School, are only ideas embodied which have
succeeded to other ideas and must give place hereafter to new.
Emerson, Journal entry November 17, 1839, Journals (1911), Volume 5, p. 333
Temperance.Who argues so sourly for beef and mutton against the man of herbs and grains?
The fat and ruddy eater who hath just wiped his lips from feeding on a sirloin, whose
blood is spouting in his veins, and whose strength kindles that evil fire in his eye. It is
not then the voice of man that I hear, but it is the beef and brandy that roar and rail for
beef and brandy. But shall these play the judge in their own cause?
People imagine that the place which the Bible holds in the world, it owes to miracles. It owes it
simply to the fact that it came out of a profounder depth of thought than any other book.
Women see better than men. Men see lazily, if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without
any wish to act. Men of genius are said to partake of the masculine and feminine traits.
It is the necessity of my nature to shed all influences.

My thoughts are too short, as they say my sentences are. I step along from stone to stone over the
Lethe which gurgles around my path, but the odds are that my companion encounters
me just as I leave one stone and before my foot has well reached the other, and down I
tumble into Lethe water.
In my dream I saw a man reading in the Library at Cambridge, and one who stood by said, He
readeth advertisements, meaning that he read for the market only, and not for truth.
Then I said, Do I read advertisements?
If we have seen that under our ridiculous routine of selfish trade and government bloomed unhurt
the life of God, and found ever and anon vent in our consciousness and in our action,
that we have not set ourselves systematically and invariably to stifle it, and so kill
ourselves, but in sane moments have opened it a passage into the laws and institutions,
have let our private bark follow the course of the river, and be blown in the path of the
monsoon, have not selected for honour the mean and the dead in whom no virtue lived,
and such therefore as honour could not cleanse or great aims enliven, but have let our
votes follow Ideas, and our elections express our character and aspiration, so that the
highest sentiment cheered us in the assembly of the people, and the ballot was a voice
of truth and veneration,then the State will stand, then the Laws will be memorable
and beautiful for long thousands of years, will shine by intrinsic light as easily
through many as through a few ages. Should not a man be ennobled by his vote ? Is it
not a prayer ? Now he and his candidate are both degraded.
Emerson, Journal entry December 2, 1839, Journals (1911), Volume 5, p. 357 (cf. , Politics, The Early Lectures of
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Harvard: 1972), p. 245)
Economy must be poetical, inventive, alive: that is its essence, and therein is it distinguished from
mere parsimony.
Love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men.
We are to write on this topic not by black art of any kind, not by trick, or journey work, or
direction; not stimulated by strong waters, or by fashion, or by praise, or money, but
feeling the power of the Past Ages laid on our hand. We are to stand all-related, all
accomplished, having covenanted with truth that we will bear witness for it, though by
our silence.
The whole world travails to ripen and bear the sufficiency of one man.
The wise man needs no bribe or feast or palace to draw friends to him. He is supremely fair.
He angles with himself and with no other bait.
Emerson, Journal entry December 26, 1839, Journals (1911), Volume 5, p. 360-361, also in Politics, The Early
Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Harvard: 1972), p. 243
He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no
statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road,
for he is at home where he is.
People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.
If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they
were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as spiritual life, God,
soul, cross, etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might
remain silent.
Emerson, Journal entry June 15, 1844, Journals (1911), Volume 6, p. 526
Beauty belongs to the sentiment and is always departing from those who depart out of that.
Emerson, Journal entry dated May 3, 1845, Journals (1911), Volume 7, p. 42
The hero will brave all mankind just as readily as a single enemy at the call of that private and
perfect Right of Beauty in which he lives.
The solitude of the body is the populousness of the soul.

to hide now, that we may draw the more admiration anon

You are to have a self-support which maintains you not only against all others, but against your
own skepticism.
It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.
Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or the
public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not
from the necessity of salewho writes always to the unknown friend.
Emerson, Journal entry dated April 19, 1848, Journals (1911), Volume 7, p. 440
Many times the reading of a book has made the fortune of the reader,has decided his way of
life. The reading of voyages and travels has waked the boys ambition and curiosity, and
made him a sailor and an explorer of new countries all his life, a powerful merchant, a
good soldier, a pure patriot, a successful student of science.
Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1854-1861 (1978), Volume 14, p. 118
Life is wasted in the necessary preparation of finding what is the true way, and we die just as we
enter it.
Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, W. Gilman, ed., vol. 2, p. 219
withered people with gold-filled teeth, ghastly, and with minds in the same dilapidated
condition, drugged with books for want of wisdom
Emerson, Journal entry July 21, 1850, Journals (1912), Volume 8, p. 120
Men as naturally make a state as caterpillars a web.

Emerson, Journal entry July 21, 1850, Journals (1912), Volume 8, p. 120
Letters
When I took my book to the woods I found nature not half poetical, not half visionary, enough. ...
I found that I had only transplanted into the new place my entire personal identity, and
was grievously disappointed.
Emerson, Letter dated June 8, 1823
It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some
extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that
cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of
being in Paradise again.
Emerson, Letter to Sam Ward, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, E. Tilton, ed. (1990), Volume 7, p. 393
Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living, it is a vice to remember.
You have done what you could: some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget
them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely,
and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day for all that is
good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a, moment on the
rotten yesterdays.
Emerson, Letter to his daughter, cited in Poems and Essays, G. Browne, ed. (1897), p. 74, footnote
They are bent on popular actions. I am, in all my theory, ethics, and politics, a poet; and of no
more use in their New York than a rainbow or a firefly.
Emerson, describing Horace Greeley and Albert Brisbane Letter to his daughter Lidian, March 1, 1842, cited in J. Cabot,
A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1887), vol. 2, pp. 489-490
They fasten me in their thought to Transcendentalism, whereof you know I am wholly

guiltless, and which is spoken of as a known and fixed element, like salt or meal. So
that I have to begin by endless disclaimers and explanations: I am not the man
you take me for.
Emerson, Letter to his daughter Lidian, March 1, 1842, cited in J. Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1887),
vol. 2, p. 490
One of these days shall we not have new laws forbidding solitude, and severe penalties on all
separatists and unsocial thinkers?
Emerson, Letter to his daughter Lidian, March 1, 1842, cited in J. Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1887),
vol. 2, p. 490
Early Lectures
http://www.rwe.org/
The Head
For practical rules for the culture of the intellect perhaps none can be given that are good for all
but there are two expedients that may do such good service to very many young men
that I will venture to name them.
One is, sit alone. In your arrangements for your residence see that you have a
chamber to youself, though you sell your coat and wear a blanket.
The other is, keep a journal. Pay so much honor to the visits of Truth to your mind as
to record those thoughts that have shone therein. I suppose every lover of truth would
find his about in it if he never had two related thoughts without putting them down. It is
not for what is recorded, though that may be the argreeable entertainment of later years,
and the pleasant remembrances of what we were, but for the habit of rendering account
to yourself of yourself in some more rigorous manner and at more certain intervals than
mere conversation of casual reverie of solitude require.
Emerson, The Head, The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Politics
The appearance of character rebukes the state. It makes the state unnecessary. It leaves the
ambitious statesmen far below. The wise man is the state.
Emerson, Politics, The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Harvard: 1972), p. 243
He needs no library, for he has not done thinkinghe gets thought where the bookmaker got it;
no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no
money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.
It is plain that where a good man is set to do a public act he should occupy himself only with the
measure, not with the opinion of the people. By directing all his understanding and
affection on the fact, and not allowing the people or their enemies to arrest it, he is able
to make his hands meet to come at his end. But when the eye of the political agent veers
too frequently from the measure to the opinion of the people, and in course of time
fastens on opinion mainly,he must lose just so much steadiness of conduct and
therewith so much success.
In this country there is no measure attempted for itself by legislatures, but the opinion of the
people is courted in the first place, and the measures are perfunctorily carried through
as secondary. Instead of character there is a studious exclusion of character.
We see that Mr. A will deliver an oration of the Fourth of July and Mr. B before the Merchants or
the Farmers and we do not go because we know that these gentleman will not
communication their own character and being to the audience. A speech ought to be a
man:the heart and soul of the speaker made manifest:but our speeches are screens
and escapades, and not communications. The people are feared and flattered. They are
not reprimanded. The country is governed in bar-rooms and in the mind of bar-rooms.
The low can best win the low and each aspirant vies with the other which can stoop
lowest, depart widest from himself.
It is the privilege of this Idea of the all-sufficiency of private character that it is never absent, that
it is never reduced to wait for means. Its kingdom begins with the perception of it. It
needs no crusade against the state but the simple abstinence from participating in its
wrong deed.
Nature (1836)
Complete Works (1883), Volume 1
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What we are, that only can we see.

Emerson, Nature, Complete Works (1883), Volume 1, p. 79
Addresses and Lectures

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The American Scholar

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.
Emerson, The American Scholar, Addresses and Lectures, Complete Works (1883), vol. 1, p. 85
The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of
the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart and nothing beyond, and
sinks into the farmer instead of Man on the farm.
The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his
craft, and the soul is subject to dollars.
Nature is the opposite [i.e. complement] of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and
one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. ... The ancient precept, Know
thyself, and the modern precept, Study nature, become at last one maxim.
Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long
does it sing.
It depends on how far the process had gone, of transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the
completeness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product
be.
As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely
exclude the conventional
Emerson, The American Scholar, Addresses and Lectures, Complete Works (1883), vol. 1, pp. 89-90
Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
Hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, the act of
thought, is transferred to the record.
The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason,
having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an
outcry, if it is disparaged.
Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start
wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles.
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which
Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and
Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.
Instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value
books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution...
I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and
made a satellite instead of a system.
The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every
man contains within him, although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn. The
soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth, or creates. In this action it is genius; not
the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man.
The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance
of genius. This is good, say they,let us hold by this.
There is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. Man thinking must not be subdued
by his instruments. Books are for the scholars idle times. When he can read God
directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other mens transcripts of their
readings.
A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.

The scholar loses no hour which the man lives.

There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. 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.
His [the scholars] duties may all be comprised in self-trust.

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. Long he must
stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept
how often! poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road,
accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of
making his own; and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent
uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the
self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to
stand to society, and especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what
offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He
is one who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public
and illustrious thoughts. He is the worlds eye. He is the worlds heart. He is to resist
the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and
communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the
conclusions of history.
Emerson, The American Scholar, Addresses and Lectures, Complete Works (1883), vol. 1, pp. 101-102
Is it not the chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit, not to be reckoned one character, not to
yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the
gross, in the hundred or the thousand of the party, the section, to which we belong?
The Method of Nature

Talent finds its models, methods, and ends, in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul
only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its
architecture from within.
Emerson, The Method of Nature, Addresses and Lectures, Complete Works (1883), vol. 1, p. 207
Nature is a mute, and man, her articulate, speaking brother, lo! he also is a mute. Yet when Genius
arrives, its speech is like a river.
Emerson, The Method of Nature, Addresses and Lectures, Complete Works (1883), vol. 1, p. 208
Essays, First Series (1841)

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History
The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and
books the commentary.
Emerson, History, Essays: First Series, Complete Works (1883), p. 13
The world exists for the education of each man.

Emerson, History, Essays: First Series, Complete Works (1883), vol. 2, p. 14
To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events
profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened on the life, and
slights the circumstance.
Emerson, History, Essays: First Series, Complete Works (1883), vol. 2, pp. 17-18
He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know
that he is greater than all the geography and all the government of the world; he must
transfer the point of view from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens
and London, to himself, and not deny his conviction that he is the court, and if England
or Egypt have any thing to say to him he will try the case; if not, let them forever be
silent.
Emerson, History, Essays: First Series, Complete Works (1883), vol. 2, p. 14
Self-Reliance
Prayer that craves a particular commodity, any thing less than all good, is vicious.
Emerson, Self-Reliance
The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain.
Emerson, Self-Reliance, Essays: First Series (1883), p. 47
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.
The highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and
traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they, thought.
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from
within more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses
without notice his own thought, because it is his.
Emerson, Self-Reliance, Essays: First Series (1883), pp. 47-48
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts. They come back to us with a
certain alienated majesty.
... imitation is suicide.

The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.
Trust thyself. Every heart vibrates to that iron strain.

Accept the place that divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries,
the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves
childlike to the genius of their age, betraying the perception that the absolutely
trustworthy was seated in their hearts...
What pretty oracles natures yield us on this text in the behavior of children... Their mind being
whole, their eye is as yet unconquered... Infancy conforms to nobody.
The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner and would disdain as much as a lord to do or
say aught to conciliate one is the healthy attitude of human nature.
Independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he
tries and sentences them on their merits in the swift summary way of boys, as good,
bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about
consequences, about interests. He gives an independent, genuine verdict.
But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or
spoken with clat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of
hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. ... Ah that he could pass
again into his neutrality! He who can thus avoid all pledges and, having observed,
observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence,
must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs which ...
would sink like darts into the ear of mean and put them in fear.
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into
the world.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.
The virtue in most request is conformity.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist... must not be hindered by the name of
goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

I remember an answer which, when quite young, I was prompted to make to a valued advisor who
was wont to importune me with the dual doctrines of the Church. On my saying What
have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? My friend
suggested But these impulses may be from below, not from above. I replied They do
not seem to me to be such, but if I am the Devils child, I will live then from the Devil.
No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. ... The only right is what is after my
constitution, the only wrong what is against it.
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.
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? Thy love afar is spite at
home.
Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love.

Your truth must have some edge to it,else it is none.

The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that
pules and whines.
Do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations.
Are they my poor? I tell thee thou foolish philanthropist that I grudge the dollar, the
dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.
There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for
them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the
education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which
many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;though I
confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar,
which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate rather the exception than the rule. Men do what is called a
good action ... much as they would pay a fine. ... Their works are done as an apology or
extenuation of their living in the world. ... Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to
expiate, but to live. My life is for itself, and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it
should be of lower strain, so it be genuine and equal than that it be glittering and
unsteady.
I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his
actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear
those actions which are reckoned excellent. ... Few and mean as my gifts may be, I
actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows
any secondary testimony.
Emerson, Self-Reliance, Essays: First Series (1883), p. 54-55
It is easy in the world to live after the worlds opinion. It is easy in solitude to live after our
own. But the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect
sweetness the independence of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force.
It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead
church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the
government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers,under all these
screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force
is withdrawn from your proper life.
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? Do I not know that with all this
ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution he will do no such thing? Do I
not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, the permitted side,
not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the
bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or
another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities
of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a
few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is
not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins
us and we know not where to begin to set them right.
For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know
how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or
in the friend's parlor. If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his
own he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the
multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the
wind blows and a newspaper directs.
Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard
words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.' Ah, so you shall be
sure to be misunderstood.'Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was
misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and
Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be
misunderstood.
Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not
see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.
There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in
their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem.
These varieties ore lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One
tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.
See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.
Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your
conformity explains nothing.
Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and
hurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all
history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man
works.
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, 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.
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ' I think,' ' I am,' but quotes
some saint or sage.
These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones
Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in
communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the
urns of other men.
Your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At times the whole
world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client,
child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say, '
Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion.
Truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of
humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart,
faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to
himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!
The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every thing to the new terminology as a girl
who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will
happen for a time that the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study
of his master's mind. But in all unbalanced minds the classification is idolized,
passes for the end and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the
system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the
luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built.
The reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of
self-reliance.
Men measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.
Emerson, Self-Reliance, Essays: First Series, Complete Works (1883), vol. 2, p. 86
Spiritual Laws
The thing uttered in words is not therefore affirmed. It must affirm itself, or no forms of logic or
of oath can give it evidence. The sentence must also contain its own apology for being
spoken.
Emerson, Spiritual Laws, Essays: First Series, Complete Works (1883), vol. 2, p. 145
That statement only is fit to be made public which you have come at in attempting to satisfy your
own curiosity.
They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the
hour when it appears, but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be
entreated and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.
Friendship
I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are
not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know.
Emerson, Friendship, Essays: First Series, Complete Works (1883), vol. 2, p. 192
The sweet sincerity of joy and peace which I draw from this alliance with my brother's soul is the
nut itself whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and shell.
Emerson, Friendship, Essays: First Series, Complete Works (1883), vol. 2, pp. 192-193
All the speed in that contest [for friendship] depends on intrinsic nobleness and the contempt of
trifles.
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at
last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those undermost
garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and
may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom
meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the
highest rank; that being permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or
conform unto.
Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements,
by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man who
under a certain religious frenzy cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliment and
commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with
great insight and beauty. At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But
persistingas indeed he could not help doingfor some time in this course, he attained
to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him.
No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chat of
markets or reading-rooms. But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the
like plain dealing, and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he
did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side
and its back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity,
is it not? We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires some civility,
requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or
philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation
with him.
I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances.
Circles
Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these
are sacred.
Emerson, Circles, Essays: First Series (1883), p. 295
Essays, Second Series (1844)

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The Poet
Those who are esteemed umpires of taste are often persons who have acquired some
knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever
is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their
own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual.
Emerson, The Poet, Essays, Second Series (1883), p. 9
The poet stands among partial men for the complete man.
Emerson, The Poet, Essays, Second Series, Complete Works (1883), p. 11
The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is.
All men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in
labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the
other half is his expression.
The great majority of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into possession of their
own, or mutes, who cannot report the conversation they have had with nature.
The poet is the Namer or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance,
sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's,
thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. The poets
made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must
say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is
forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for
the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The
etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is
fossil poetry.
Experience
To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest
number of good hours, is wisdom. ... Since our office is with moments, let us husband them.
Emerson, Experience, Essays, Second Series (1883), p. 63
A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men who all
catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.
The world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think. I observe that
difference, and shall observe it.
I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize the world of thought.
... paltry empiricism

Did our birth fall in some fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was so sparing of her
fire and so liberal of her earth that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative principle,
and though we have health and reason, yet we have no superfluity of spirit for new
creation?
Emerson, Experience, Essays, Second Series (1883)
Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel
and hangs on every other sail in the horizon. Our life looks trivial, and we shun to
record it.
Men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating and reference.
The men ask, 'What's the news?' as if the old were so bad.
How many individuals can we count in society? how many actions? how many opinions? So
much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the
pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours.
I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think. I
observe that difference, and shall observe it. One day I shall know the value and law of
this discrepance. But I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts
to realize the world of thought. Many eager persons successively make an experiment
in this way, and make themselves ridiculous. They acquire democratic manners, they
foam at the mouth, they hate and deny. Worse, I observe that in the history of mankind
there is never a solitary example of success, taking their own tests of success. I say
this polemically, or in reply to the inquiry, Why not realize your world?
Far be from me the despair which prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism.
We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time
to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope
and an insight which becomes the light of our life. We dress our garden, eat our dinners,
discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are
forgotten next week; but, in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has
a sanity and revelations which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him.
There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here at least we shall find reality,
sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit.
Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates.
Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be
many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what
lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can,
and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It
depends on the mood of the man whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There
are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we
can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament.
Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung.
Of what use is genius if the organ is too convex or too concave and cannot find a focal distance
within the actual horizon of human life?
The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudent knowingness.
The physicians say they are not materialists; but they are: Spirit is matter reduced to an
extreme thinness: O so thin!
The definition of spiritual should be, that which is its own evidence.
Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but health of body consists in circulation, and sanity
of mind in variety or facility of association. We need change of objects. Dedication to
one thought is quickly odious. We house with the insane, and must humor them; then
conversation dies out. Once I took such delight in Montaigne that I thought I should not
need any other book; before that, in Shakspeare; then in Plutarch; then in Plotinus; at
one time in Bacon; afterwards in Goethe; even in Bettine; but now I turn the pages of
either of them languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius. So with pictures; each will
bear an emphasis of attention once, which it cannot retain, though we fain would
continue to be pleased in that manner.
Divinity is behind our failures and follies also. The plays of children are nonsense, but very
educative nonsense.
Nominalist and Realist

Money, which represents the prose of life.
Emerson, Nominalist and Realist, Essays, Second Series, Complete Works (1883), p. 221
Representative Men (1850)

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http://books.google.com/books?id=9vQOAAAAIAAJ
1. Uses of Great Men

The search after the great is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.
Emerson, Uses of Great Men, Representative Men (1892), p. 6
Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.
Emerson, Uses of Great Men, Representative Men (1892), p. 8
It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how splendid is
that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men.
Emerson, Uses of Great Men, Representative Men (1892), pp. 8-9
2. Plato, or the Philosopher

When we are praising Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from Solon, and Sophron, and
Philolaus. Be it so. Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all
forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his
ancestors.
Emerson, Plato, or the Philosopher, Representative Men (1892), p. 44
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. ... They lived in their writings, and so their house
and street life was trivial and commonplace.
Emerson, 2, Plato, or the Philosopher, Representative Men (1892), p. 45
4. Montaigne, or the Skeptic

The lesson of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and the centuries say
against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars.
Emerson, 4, Montaigne, or the Skeptic, Representative Men (1892)
7. Goethe; or, the Writer

His [the writers] failures are the preparation of his victories. A new thought, or a crisis of
passion, apprises him that all that he has yet learned and written is exoteric, is not
the fact, but some rumor of the fact. What then ? Does he throw away the pen? No; he
begins again to describe in the new light which has shined on him.
Emerson, 7, Goethe; or, the Writer, Representative Men (1892), pp. 267-268
There is a certain heat in the breast, which attends the perception of a primary truth, which is the
shining of the spiritual sun down into the shaft of the mine.
Emerson, Goethe; or, the Writer, Representative Men (1892), p. 269
Every thought which dawns on the mind, in the moment of its emergence announces its own
rank.
Society has, at all times, the same want, namely, of one sane man with adequate powers of
expression to hold up each object of monomania, in its right relations. The ambitious
and mercenary bring their last new mumbo-jumbo, whether tariff, Texas, railroad,
Romanism, mesmerism, or California; and, by detaching the object from its relations,
easily succeed in making it seen in a glare; and a multitude go mad about it, and they
are not to be reproved or cured by the opposite multitude, who are kept from this
particular insanity by an equal frenzy on another crotchet.
Emerson, Goethe; or, the Writer, Representative Men (1892), pp. 269-270
There is a certain ridicule, among superficial people, thrown on the scholars or clerisy, which is
of no import, unless the scholar heed it. In this country, the emphasis of conversation,
and of public opinion, commends the practical man. It is believed, the ordering a
cargo of goods from New York to Smyrna; or, the running up and down to procure a
company of subscribers to set a-going five or ten thousand spindles; or, the negotiations
of a caucus, and the practising on the prejudices and facility of country-people, to
secure their votes in November,is practical and commendable.
Emerson, Goethe; or, the Writer Representative Men (1892), pp. 270-271
Act, if you like,but you do it at your peril. Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a
man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What
they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act,
which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament. The fiery reformer
embodies his aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and his friends cleave to
the form, and lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established Quakerism, the
Shaker has established his monastery and his dance; and, although each prates of
spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti-spiritual.
Emerson, Goethe; or, the Writer Representative Men (1892), p. 271
In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no
higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of
cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical
faculty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and
negation.
The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily
be one of the most private circumstance.
How can he [todays writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself; when he loses
himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant,
ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public.
Amid littleness and detail, he detected the Genius of life, the old cunning Proteus, nestling close
beside us, and showed that the dulness and prose we ascribe to the age was only another
of his masks:
His very flight is presence in disguise
that he had put off a gay uniform for a fatigue dress, and this by tracing the pedigree
of every usage and practice, every institution, utensil, and means, home to its origin in
the structure of man.
The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the
English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a
superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end?
Talent alone can not make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which,
by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see
and state things so, and not otherwise; holding things because they are things. If he can
not rightly express himself to-day, the same things subsist, and will open themselves tomorrow. There lies the burden on his mind,the burden of truth to be declared,more
or less understood; and it constitutes his business and calling in the world, to see those
facts through, and to make them known. What signifies that he trips and stammers; that
his voice is harsh or hissing; that his method or his tropes are inadequate? That message
will find method and imagery, articulation and melody. Though he were dumb, it would
speak. If not,if there be no such God's word in the man,what care we how adroit,
how fluent, how brilliant he is?
It makes a great difference to the force of any sentence, whether there be a man
behind it, or no. In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form;
only some irresponsible shadow; oftener some moneyed corporation, or some dangler,
who hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But, through
every clause and part of speech of a right book, I meet the eyes of the most determined
of men: his force and terror inundate every word: the commas and dashes are alive; so
that the writing is athletic and nimble.
He has no aims less large than the conquest of universal nature, of universal truth, to be his
portion: a man not to be bribed, nor deceived, nor overawed; of a stoical selfcommand and self denial, and having one test for all men,What can you teach
me? All possessions are valued by him for that only; rank, privileges, health, time,
being itself.
An intellectual man can see himself as a third person; therefore his faults and delusions interest
him equally with his successes. Though he wishes to prosper in affairs, he wishes more
to know the history and destiny of man; whilst the clouds of egotists drifting about him
are only interested in a low success.
Goethe, coming into an over-civilized time and country, when original talent was oppressed under
the load of books and mechanical auxiliaries, and the distracting variety of claims,
taught men how to dispose of this mountainous miscellany, and make it subservient. I
join Napoleon with him, as being both representatives of the impatience and reaction of
nature against the morgue of conventions,two stern realists, who, with their scholars,
have severally set the axe at the root of the tree of cant.
It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by
few elements, but by the highest complexity. Man is the most composite of all
creatures.
Goethe teaches courage, and the equivalence of all times; that the disadvantages of any epoch
exist only to the faint-hearted.
We too must write bibles.

The Conduct of Life (1860)

http://books.google.com/books?id=4PM_AAAAYAAJ
Money often costs too much.

Emerson, The Conduct of Life, Chapter 3, Wealth, p. 107
I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run away to other countries
because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for
nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are
you that have no task to keep you at home? I have been quoted as saying captious
things about travel; but I mean to do justice. .... He that does not fill a place at home,
cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a larger crowd. You do
not think you will find anything there which you have not seen at home? The stuff of all
countries is just the same. Do you suppose there is any country where they do not scald
milk-pans, and swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish? What is
true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where he will, he can only find so
much beauty or worth as he carries.
Emerson, The Conduct of Life, Chapter 4, Culture, p. 145
People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
Emerson, The Conduct of Life, Chapter 6, Worship, p. 214
Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in
their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not
to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and
draw individuals out of them.
Emerson The Conduct of Life, Chapter 7, Considerations by the Way, Complete Works (1883), vol. 6, p. 237
Society and Solitude (1870)

http://books.google.com/books?id=KUstAAAAYAAJ
There are metals, like potassium and sodium, which, to be kept pure, must be kept under naphtha.
Such are the talents determined on some specialty, which a culminating civilization
fosters in the heart of great cities and in royal chambers. Nature protects her own work.
To the culture of the world an Archimedes, a Newton is indispensable; so she guards
them by a certain aridity. If these had been good fellows, fond of dancing, port, and
clubs, we should have had no Theory of the Sphere and no Principia. They had that
necessity of isolation which genius feels. Each must stand on his glass tripod if he
would keep his electricity.
Emerson, Society and Solitude, Chapter 1, Complete Works (1883), vol. 7, p. 12
Such is the tragic necessity which strict science finds underneath our domestic and neighborly
life, irresistibly driving each adult soul as with whips into the desert, and making our
warm covenants sentimental and momentary. We must infer that the ends of thought
were peremptory, if they were to be secured at such ruinous cost. They are deeper than
can be told, and belong to the immensities and eternities. They reach down to that depth
where society itself originates and disappears ; where the question is, Which is first,
man or men ? where the individual is lost in his source.
A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.
'T is not new facts that avail, but the heat to dissolve everybody's facts.
In society, high advantages are set down to the individual as disqualifications.

We sink as easily as we rise, through sympathy. So many men whom I know are degraded by
their sympathies; their native aims being high enough, but their relation all too tender to
the gross people about them. Men cannot afford to live together on their merits, and
they adjust themselves by their demerits,by their love of gossip, or by sheer tolerance
and animal good-nature. They untune and dissipate the brave aspirant.
That work is ever the more pleasant to the imagination which is not now required.
Emerson, Society and Solitude, Chapter 7, Works and Days, Complete Works (1883), vol. 7, p. 169
Letters and Social Aims

http://books.google.com/books?id=rgoRAAAAYAAJ
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of
character, can make any stand against good wit.
Emerson, Letters and Social Aims, Complete Works (1883), Volume 8, p. 163
Poems
http://books.google.com/books?id=OCo4AAAAYAAJ
The horseman serves the horse,

The neatherd serves the neat,
The merchant serves the purse,
The eater serves his meat;
'T is the day of the chattel,
Web to weave, and corn to grind;
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.
Emerson, Ode, Complete Works (1883), vol. 9, p. 73
Lectures and Biographical Sketches

http://books.google.com/books?id=W406AAAAMAAJ
The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly
developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief.
Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatness,
ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.
Emerson, The Scholar, Lectures and Biographical Sketches, Complete Works (1883), vol. 10, p. 279
Natural History of Intellect

http://books.google.com/books?id=Djs6AAAAMAAJ
When I look at the tree or the river and have not yet definitely made out what they would say to
me, they are by no means unimpressive. I wait for them, I enjoy them before they yet
speak. I feel as if I stood by an ambassador charged with the message of his king, which
he does not deliver because the hour when he should say it is not yet arrived.
Emerson, Natural History of Intellect, Complete Works (1883), vol. 12, pp. 6-7
My belief in the use of a course on philosophy is that the student shall learn to appreciate the
miracle of the mind; shall learn its subtle but immense power, or shall begin to learn it;
shall come to know that in seeing and in no tradition he must find what truth is; that he
shall see in it the source of all traditions, and shall see each one of them as better or
worse statement of its revelations; shall come to trust it entirely, as the only true; to
cleave to God against the name of God.
Emerson, Natural History of Intellect, Complete Works (1883), vol. 12, p. 7
'T is a great vice in all countries, the sacrifice of scholars to be courtiers and diners-out, to talk for
the amusement of those who wish to be amused, though the stars of heaven must be
plucked down and packed into rockets to this end.
What we really want is not a haste to act, but a certain piety toward the source of action and
knowledge. In fact we have to say that there is a certain beatitude, I can call it
nothing less, to which all men are entitled, tasted by them in different degrees, which
is a perfection of their nature, and to which their entrance must be in every way
forwarded. Practical men, though they could lift the globe, cannot arrive at this.
Something very different has to be done, the availing ourselves of every impulse of
genius, an emanation of the heaven it tells of, and the resisting this conspiracy of men
and material things against the sanitary and legitimate inspirations of the intellectual
nature.1 What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which
he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate
and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so
much we are.
Emerson, Natural History of Intellect, Complete Works (1883), vol. 12, p. 9-10
My contribution will be simply historical. I write anecdotes of the intellect; a sort of

Farmer's Almanac of mental moods. I confine my ambition to true reporting of its
play in natural action.
I confess to a little distrust of that completeness of system which metaphysicians are apt to affect.
'T is the gnat grasping the world. All these exhaustive theories appear indeed a false and
vain attempt to introvert and analyze the Primal Thought. That is upstream, and what a
stream! Can you swim up Niagara Falls?
Metaphysics is dangerous as a single pursuit. We should feel more confidence in the same results
from the mouth of a man of the world.
I want not the logic, but the power, if any, which it brings into science and literature; the
man who can humanize this logic, these syllogisms, and give me the results. The
adepts value only the pure geometry, the aerial bridge ascending from earth to
heaven with arches and abutments of pure reason. I am fully contented if you tell
me where are the two termini.
But this watching of the mind, in season and out of season, to see the mechanics of the thing, is a
little of the detective. The analytic process is cold and bereaving and, shall I say it?
somewhat mean, as spying. There is something surgical in metaphysics as we treat it.
Were not an ode a better form? The poet sees wholes and avoids analysis; the
metaphysician, dealing as it were with the mathematics of the mind, puts himself out of
the way of the inspiration; loses that which is the miracle and creates the worship.
Emerson, Natural History of Intellect, Complete Works (1883), vol. 12, p.
Philosophy is still rude and elementary. It will one day be taught by poets. The poet is in the
natural attitude; he is believing; the philosopher, after some struggle, having only
reasons for believing.
To Be is the unsolved, unsolvable wonder. To Be, in its two connections of inward and outward,
the mind and Nature. The wonder subsists, and age, though of eternity, could not
approach a solution. But the suggestion is always returning, that hidden source
publishing at once our being and that it is the source of outward Nature. Who are we,
and what is Nature, have one answer in the life that rushes into us.
In my thought I seem to stand on the bank of a river and watch the endless flow of the stream,
floating objects of all shapes, colors and natures; nor can I much detain them as they
pass, except by running beside them a little way along the bank. But whence they come
or whither they go is not told me. ... Who has found the boundaries of human
intelligence? Who has made a chart of its channel, or approached the fountain of this
wonderful Nile?
Life is incessant parturition. There are viviparous and oviparous minds; minds that produce their
thoughts complete men, like armed soldiers, ready and swift to go out to resist and
conquer all the armies of error, and others that deposit their dangerous unripe thoughts
here and there to lie still for a time and be brooded in other minds, and the shell not be
broken until the next age, for them to begin, as new individuals, their career.
Our eating, trading, marrying, and learning are mistaken by us for ends and realities, whilst they
are properly symbols only; when we have come, by a divine leading, into the inner
firmament, we are apprised of the unreality or representative character of what we
esteemed final.
There is no solitary flower and no solitary thought. It comes single like a foreign traveller,
but find out its name, and it is related to a powerful and numerous family.
The mind is first only receptive. Surcharge it with thoughts in which it delights and it becomes
active. The moment a man begins not to be convinced, that moment he begins to
convince.
I never hear a good speech at caucus or at cattle-show but it helps me, not so much by adding to
my knowledge as by apprising me of admirable uses to which what I know can be
turned. The commonest remark, if the man could only extend it a little, would make him
a genius; but the thought is prematurely checked, and grows no more. All great masters
are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth
step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional
step you enchance immensely the value of your first.
In unfit company the finest powers are paralyzed. No ambition, no opposition, no friendly
attention and fostering kindness, no wine, music or exhilarating aids, neither warm
fireside nor fresh air, walking or riding, avail at all to resist the palsy of mis-association.
Genius is mute, is dull; there is no genius. Ask of your flowers to open when you have
let in on them a freezing wind.
There is no permanent wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain
company or other favorable conditions, become wise.
Each man is a new power in Nature. He holds the keys of the world in his hands. No quality in
Nature's vast magazines he cannot touch, no truth he cannot see. Silent, passive, even
sulkily, Nature offers every morning her wealth to man. She is immensely rich; he is
welcome to her entire goods, but she speaks no word, will not so much as beckon or
cough; only this, she is careful to leave all her doors ajar, towers, hall, storeroom and
cellar. If he takes her hint and uses her goods she speaks no word; if he blunders and
starves she says nothing. To the idle blockhead Nature is poor, sterile, inhospitable. To
the gardener her loam is all strawberries, pears, pineapples. To the miller her rivers
whirl the wheel and weave carpets and broadcloth. To the sculptor her stone is soft; to
the painter her plumbago and marl are pencils and chromes. To the poet all sounds and
words are melodies and rhythms.
Every man is a new method.

Every man is a new method and distributes things anew. If he could attain full size he would take
up, first or last, atom by atom, all the world into a new form.
Echo the leaders and they will fast enough see that you have nothing for them. They came to you
for something they had not.
The one thing not to be forgiven to intellectual persons is that they believe in the ideas of others.
From this deference comes the imbecility and fatigue of their society, for of course they
cannot affirm these from the deep life; they say what they would have you believe, but
what they do not quite know. Profound sincerity is the only basis of talent as of
character. The temptation is to patronize Providence, to fall into the accepted ways of
talking and acting of the good sort of people.
There is no property or relation in that immense arsenal of forces which the earth is, but some
man is at last found who affects this, delights to unfold and work it, as if he were the
born publisher and demonstrator of it.
A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the
stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is
assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to
knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our
invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin, congestion of
the brain, apoplexy and strangulation.
Newton did not exercise more ingenuity but less than another to see the world.
Pan ... could intoxicate by the strain of his shepherd's pipe, silent yet to most, for his pipes
make the music of the spheres, which, because it sounds eternally, is not heard at all by
the dull, but only by the mind.
A man is intellectual in proportion as he can make an object of every sensation, perception and
intuition; so long as he has no engagement in any thought or feeling which can hinder
him from looking at it as somewhat foreign.
A man of talent has only to name any form or fact with which we are most familiar,
and the strong light which he throws on it enhances it to all eyes. People wonder they
never saw it before. The detachment consists in seeing it under a new order, not under a
personal but under a universal light. To us it had economic, but to the universe it has
poetic relations, and it is as good as sun and star now. Indeed, this is the measure of all
intellectual power among men, the power to complete this detachment, the power of
genius to hurl a new individual into the world.
An intellectual man has the power to go out of himself and see himself as an object;
therefore his defects and delusions interest him as much as his successes. He not only
wishes to succeed in life, but he wishes in thought to know the history and destiny of a
man; whilst the cloud of egotists drifting about are only interested in a success to their
egotism.
A perception is always a generalization. It lifts the object, whether in material or moral nature,
into a type. The animal, the low degrees of intellect, know only individuals. The
philosopher knows only laws. That is, he considers a purely mental fact, part of the soul
itself. We say with Kenelm Digby, "All things that she knoweth are herself, and she is
all that she knoweth." Insight assimilates the thing seen. Is it only another way of
affirming and illustrating this to say that it sees nothing alone, but sees each particular
object in just connections, sees all in God? In all healthy souls is an inborn necessity
of presupposing for each particular fact a prior Being which compels it to a harmony
with all other natures. The game of Intellect is the perception that whatever befalls or
can be stated is a universal proposition; and contrariwise, that every general statement is
poetical again by being particularized or impersonated.
A single thought has no limit to its value; a thought, properly speaking, that is a truth held not
from any man's saying so, or any accidental benefit or recommendation it has in our
trade or circumstance, but because we have perceived it is a fact in the nature of things.
Emerson, Natural History of Intellect, Complete Works (1883), vol. 12, p. 40-41
Every new impression on the mind is not to be derided, but is to be accounted for, and, until
accounted for, registered as an indisputable addition to our catalogue of natural facts.
My seeing this or that, and that I see it so or so, is as much a fact in the natural history of the
world as is the freezing of water at thirty-two degrees of Fahrenheit.
My percipiency affirms the presence and perfection of law, as much as all the martyrs. A
perception, it is of a necessity older than the sun and moon, and the Father of the Gods.
Do not trifle with your perceptions, or hold them cheap. ... Say, what impresses me ought to
impress me. I am bewildered by the immense variety of attractions and cannot take a
step; but this one thread, fine as gossamer, is yet real; and I hear a whisper, which I dare
trust, that it is the thread on which the earth and the heaven of heavens are strung.
Genius is a delicate sensibility to the laws of the world, adding the power to express them again
in some new form.
The highest measure of poetic power is such insight and faculty to fuse the circumstances of today as shall make transparent the whole web of circumstance and opinion in which the
man finds himself, so that he releases himself from the traditions in which he grew,no
longer looks back to Hebrew or Greek or English use or tradition in religion, laws or
life, but sees so truly the omnipresence of eternal cause that he can convert the daily
and hourly event of New York, of Boston, into universal symbols. I owe to genius
always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common and showing me that gods
are sitting disguised in every company.
Genius is not a lazy angel contemplating itself and things. It is insatiable for expression.
Other Unpublished Papers

The whole audience were known to him and were drawn together by the expectation of
witnessing his powers. Mr. E [i.e. Charles] was fully aware of all this, and aware that
whatever he said would be eagerly and favorably listened to. Instead, therefore, of
feeling that the audience was an object of attention from him, he felt that he was an
object of attention to the audience. This of course is the reverse of what it should be.
Instead of finding his audiencelike other oratorsan angry master who is to be
pacified, or a sturdy master who is to be cajoled,and in any case, one whose difficult
regard is to be won,he takes it for granted that he has the command. He makes a
Kings Speech; condescendingly drops very fine things, which, if you listen with all
your might, will pay you.
Let him remember that the true orator must not wrap himself in himself, but must
wholly abandon himself to the sentiment he utters and to the multitude he addresses;
must become their property, to the end that they may become his.
Emerson, An unsent letter to his brother Charles, dated July 15, 1828, cited in First We Read, Then We Write (2009), p.
67

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RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)

He is a poor writer who does not teach courage of treatment.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

Be not the slave of your own past.

As we grow old the beauty steals inward.

Things must take my scale, not I theirs.

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.

Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson (1890)

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

Every man's Reason is sufficient for his guidance, if used.

Once read, he is but half read.

It is the necessity of my nature to shed all influences.

The solitude of the body is the populousness of the soul.

to hide now, that we may draw the more admiration anon

Men as naturally make a state as caterpillars a web.

They fasten me in their thought to Transcendentalism, whereof you know I am wholly

What we are, that only can we see.

Addresses and Lectures

The American Scholar

A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.

The scholar loses no hour which the man lives.

His [the scholars] duties may all be comprised in self-trust.

The Method of Nature

Essays, First Series (1841)

The world exists for the education of each man.

... imitation is suicide.

Trust thyself. Every heart vibrates to that iron strain.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love.

Your truth must have some edge to it,else it is none.

Essays, Second Series (1844)

... paltry empiricism

Nominalist and Realist

Representative Men (1850)

1. Uses of Great Men

2. Plato, or the Philosopher

4. Montaigne, or the Skeptic

7. Goethe; or, the Writer

We too must write bibles.

The Conduct of Life (1860)

Money often costs too much.

Society and Solitude (1870)

In society, high advantages are set down to the individual as disqualifications.

Letters and Social Aims

The horseman serves the horse,

Lectures and Biographical Sketches

Natural History of Intellect

My contribution will be simply historical. I write anecdotes of the intellect; a sort of

Every man is a new method.

Other Unpublished Papers

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