The Complete Works Of Ralph Waldo Emerson

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great is the soul, and plain. It is no flatterer, it is no follower; it never appeals from itself. It believes in itself.

I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect.

A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk.

The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and morals of mankind are all at the mercy of a new generalization.

When we see the conqueror we do not think much of any one battle or success. We see that we had exaggerated the difficulty. It was easy to him.

He shall then know that there is somewhat more blessed and great in hearing than in speaking. Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

Art is the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end. A man should find in it an outlet for his whole energy.

For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear under different names in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but which we will call here the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he is essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent in him, and his own, patent.

Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods.

The ardors of piety agree at last with the coldest skepticism,--that nothing is of us or our works,--that all is of God.

Comme il faut,

- correct in behavior or etiquette.

The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile, either on persons, or opinions, or possessions.

God knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door; but whenever used in strictness and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point at original energy. It describes a man standing in his own right and working after untaught methods.

This is the history of governments,--one man does something which is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me; looking from afar at me ordains that a part of my labor shall go to this or that whimsical end,--not as I, but as he happens to fancy.

The rotation which whirls every leaf and pebble to the meridian, reaches to every gift of man, and we all take turns at the top.

It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again.

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.

The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.'

"you must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war."

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and commonplace.

he who is good has no kind of envy.

the fine which the good, refusing to govern, ought to pay, is, to be governed by a worse man;

"What God is," he said, "I know not; what he is not I know."

Let us go abroad; let us mix in affairs; let us learn, and get, and have, and climb.

We have few readers, many spectators and hearers.

"A great reputation is a great noise; the more there is made, the farther off it is heard.

"some god gave me the power to paint what I suffer."

A friendly thought is the purest gift that man can afford to man. "Speech" also, they say, "is cheerfuler than light itself."

Brothers, especially in these days, are much to us: had one no brother, one could hardly understand what it was to have a Friend; they are the Friends whom Nature chose for us;

As for me I honor peace before all things; the silence of a great soul is to me greater than anything it will ever say, it ever can say.

I say it is right and fitting that one be left entirely alone now and then, alone with one's own griefs and sins, with the mysterious ancient Earth round one, the everlasting Heaven over one, and what one can make of these.

I have stood so in close contact face to face with the reality of Earth, with its haggard ugliness, its divine beauty, its depths of Death and of Life.

* A criticism by Emerson of Past and Present, in the Dial for July, 1843. It embodies a great part of the extract from Emerson's Diary given in a preceding note, and is well worth reading in full for its appreciation of Carlyle's powers and defects.

And when shall I show you a pretty pasture and wood-lot which I bought last week on the borders of a lake which is the chief ornament of this town, called Walden Pond?

Life is somewhat customary and usual; and death is the unusual and astonishing; it kills in so far the survivor also, when it ravishes from him friendship and the most noble and admirable qualities.

The Reverend Beriah Green, President for some years of Oneida Institute, a manual-labor school at Whitesboro, N.Y. He was an active reformer, and a leading member of the National Convention which met in Philadelphia, December 4th, 1833, to form the American Antislavery Society. He died in 1874, seventy-nine years old. ---------

Look up

My respect for silence, my distrust of Speech, seem to grow upon me. There is a time for both, says Solomon; but we, in our poor generation, have forgotten one of the "times."

"We must pay our tribute to Time":

for she was the rest that rewarded labor.

One thing is forever good; That one thing is Success,--

Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:

He follows joy, and only joy.

She lays her beams in music, In music every one, To the cadence of the whirling world Which dances round the sun--

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

These the siroc could not melt,