Self-Reliance and Other Essays

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

A great poet, who appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light which is anywhere radiating.

Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken wisely.

He knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high place, wherever he finds it.

The world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas, Æsop’s Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men.

Elated with success, and piqued by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no book-stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to discover whether the boy Shakespeare poached or not, whether he held horses at the theater-door, whether he kept school, and why he left in his will only his second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.

The sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with wings, and not yet a butterfly.

The poet admires the man of energy and tactics; the merchant breeds his son for the church or the bar; and where a man is not vain and egotistic you shall find what he has not by his praise.

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life. It is God taking thought for oxen. It moves matter after the laws of matter. It is content to seek health of body by complying with physical conditions, and health of mind by the laws of the intellect.

There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. It is sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three. One class lives to the utility of the symbol, esteeming health and wealth a final good. Another class live above this mark of the beauty of the symbol, as the poet and artist and the naturalist and man of science. A third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified; these are wise men.

I would stipulate the second class doesn't exist. No one knowingly loves a symbol of a truth but only the symbol insofar as it represents the truth. Emerson is being pretentious here and assuming his own superiority.

If a man lose his balance and immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he may be a good wheel or pin, but he is not a cultivated man.

Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible and divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters.

Do what we can, summer will have its flies. If we walk in the woods we must feed mosquitoes.

If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey it will yield us bees.

In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

Let him learn that everything in nature, even motes and feathers, go by law and not by luck, and that what he sows he reaps.

How much of human life is lost in waiting!

So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable things, prudence does not consist in evasion or in flight, but in courage. He who wishes to walk in the most peaceful parts of life with any serenity must screw himself up to resolution.

Let him front the object of his worst apprehension, and his stoutness will commonly make his fears groundless.

The Latin proverb says, “in battles the eye is first overcome.” The eye is daunted and greatly exagge...

Far off, men swell, bully and threaten: bring them hand to hand, and they are a feeble folk.

If you meet a sectary or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines, but meet on what common ground remains,—if only that the sun shines and the rain rains for both,—the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it, the boundary mountains on which the eye had fastened have melted into air.

Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

Men walk as prophecies of the next age.

The field cannot be well seen from within the field.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.

In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred.

People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

The great man is not convulsible or tormentable. He is so much that events pass over him without much impression.

People say sometimes, “See what I have overcome; see how cheerful I am; see how completely I have triumphed over these black events.” Not if they still remind me of the black event,—they have not yet conquered.

True conquest is the causing the black event to fade and disappear as an early cloud of insignificant result in a history so large and advancing.