Self-Reliance and Other Essays

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

These principles of life can all be enumerated in twenty words—self-reliance, culture, intellectual and moral independence, the divinity of nature and man, the necessity of labor, and high ideals.

The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are successful; that justice is not done now.

That which they hear in schools and pulpits without afterthought, if said in conversation, would probably be questioned in silence.

he is answered by a silence which conveys well enough to an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to make his own statement.

Polarity, or action and reaction,

An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole;

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The entire system of things gets represented in every particle.

but a certain compensation balances every gift and every defect. A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a reduction from another part of the same creature.

The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What we gain in power is lost in time; and the converse.

Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess.

It is to answer for its moderation with its life.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something.

Nature hates monopolies and exceptions.

The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his many attributes.

Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Res nolunt diu male administrari.

Everything in nature contains all the powers of nature.

Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny.

,—the dice of God are always loaded.

Every act rewards itself, or, in other words, integrates itself, in a twofold manner; first, in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly, in the circumstance, or in apparent nature.

how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair;

to get a one end, without an other end.

We can no more have things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow. “Drive out nature with a fork, she comes running back.”

he sees the mermaid’s head, but not the dragon’s tail; and thinks he can cut off that which he would have, from that which he would not have.

🎼You take the good, you take the bad and there you have the facts of life🎶

There is a crack in everything God has made.

The Devil is an ass.

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily punished. They are punished by fear.

Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions.

He indicates great wrongs which must be revised.

Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest, say the prudent, is the dearest labor.

The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself.

For the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs.

These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue,...

The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the knowledge of material and moral nature which his honest care and pains yield to the operative.

The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the power: but they who do not the thing have not the power.

Give and Take, the doctrine that everything has its price,—and if that price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and that it is impossible to get anything without its price,—is

On the other hand, the law holds with equal sureness for all right action.

The good are befriended even by weakness and defect.

Our strength grows out of our weakness.

A great man is always willing to be little.

Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he is punished, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill.

Blame is safer than praise.

I hate to be defended in a newspaper.

As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain ...

A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason, and traversing its work.

The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.

Every advantage has its tax.

But the doctrine of compensation is not the doctrine of indifferency.

The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul is.

It is harm inasmuch as it is worse not to be than to be.

There is no tax on the good of virtue; for that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute existence without any comparative.