Emerson Quotes

“not through the academy—named in honor of Plato’s place of instruction—but through the institution named for the walk where the practical Aristotle taught, the Lyceum.4”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“his own history.” In other words, Napoleon became “the idol of common men because he had in transcendent degrees the qualities and powers of common men.” These qualities were all in Napoleon’s favor, for Emerson, and it is for different reasons that Napoleon becomes the infernal figure in this pantheon of half-gods. He is the perfect representative of the business class, he is thoroughly modern, he is no saint. He once ordered Bourrienne, his secretary, to hold all letters unopened for three weeks, by which time most of them had taken care of themselves. Above all, Napoleon is pure materialism, “pointing at a sensual success and employing the richest and most varied means to that end  .  .  .  subordinating all intellectual and spiritual forces into means to a material success.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“them.” The wise skeptic does not teach doubt at last but how “to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting.”9”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“symbolic, or representative of us. “What can Shakespeare tell in any way but to the Shakespeare in us?” Emerson is a leveler, but he believes in leveling up. “As to what we call the masses, and common men,” he says toward the close of the introductory lecture, “The Uses of Great Men,” “there are no common men. All men are at last of a size, and true art is only possible on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere.” This conviction is the basis not only of art but of the interpretation of art. “The possibility of interpretation,” he says, “lies in the identity of the observer with the observed.”4”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“experience of him” as opposed to the criticism of such critics as T. S. Eliot, in whose case “you always think—at least I always feel—that he is agreeing with some professor or slightly disagreeing with another.”3”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“quite different. Emerson’s book included no Americans. The final selection was Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe, standing respectively for man as philosopher, mystic, skeptic, poet, materialist, and writer. By”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“AS ALWAYS EMERSON WAS A LITTLE AHEAD OF HIMSELF. Perhaps the direct acceptance of age gave him a momentary sense that he had overcome it. During 1867 he gave eighty lectures; he made two western trips through fourteen states. Only once before, in 1856, had he taken on so heavy a schedule.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“But now in 1865 so deeply was Emerson enmeshed in the war and in public life (he gave an astonishing seventy-seven lectures in 1865) that the public events and his reponses to them”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“as moral. Lidian hoped that other mothers would similarly obstruct and condition their sons’ enlistment, thus forcing the president to declare emancipation in order to raise more men. When emancipation was proclaimed, Emerson and Lidian agreed, reluctantly, that Edward could now enlist. But Edward himself was now dissuaded by an old family friend, John Murray Forbes. One of Forbes’s sons—”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“The Emerson who ended each essay in Representative Men with an inventory of the defects of Plato or Shakespeare or Goethe now did the same for Thoreau. “I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition,”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“Emerson’s Thoreau is a transcendentalist; he perceived “the material world as a means and a symbol.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“he never knew the use of tobacco; and though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun.” Emerson understood Thoreau; he said there was something military in Thoreau’s nature and that he only really felt himself when in opposition: “He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise.” Emerson insists on Thoreau’s Americanness (“his aversation from English and European manners and tastes almost reached contempt”) and on his originality. He had an eye for physical detail; Thoreau could “pace sixteen rods more accurately than another man could measure them with rod and chain.” He invented a better pencil, and “from a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils, he could take up with his hands fast enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp.”4”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“Emerson disapproved of the war as long as it was fought only to hold the Union together. He continued lecturing, mostly on nonwar subjects. In”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“with the heart of Darwin’s argument, “that species are only strongly marked and permanent varieties, and that each species first existed as a variety.”9 Emerson’s reading in Goethe long ago had prepared him for some of Darwin’s conclusions, for “the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype” and that “probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“After 1858 Emerson still had fourteen years of active lecturing left, during which he gave an average of forty-seven lectures a year. In”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“There is nothing in this list that Emerson had not learned firsthand. These are not abstractions but practical rules for everyday life. The public consequences of such convictions for Emerson were a politics of social liberalism, abolitionism, women’s suffrage, American Indian rights, opposition to the Mexican War, and civil disobedience when government was wrong. The personal consequence of such perceptions was an almost intolerable awareness that every morning began with infinite promise. Any book may be read, any idea thought, any action taken. Anything that has ever been possible to human beings is possible to most of us every time the clock says six in the morning. On a day no different from the one now breaking, Shakespeare sat down to begin Hamlet and Fuller began her history of the Roman revolution of 1848.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“idle at best, destructive at worst. Your work, as Ruskin says, should be the praise of what you love.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“Squire” Nathan Brooks; Mary Rice; Ephraim Allen; Stearns Wheeler and his wife; Bronson Alcott; Waldo and Lidian Emerson; and the entire Thoreau family. Henry’s sister Sophia was on the executive committee of the Middlesex County antislavery society in 1851, as was Mary Brooks. The escape network kept busy. When the fugitive slave bill became law in September 1850, there were 8,975 persons of color in Massachusetts, according to Theodore Parker. Within sixty hours of the bill’s passage forty of these had fled. As time passed, the network of safe houses grew. At a meeting on July 9, 1854, Waldo and Lidian Emerson were among a small group of Concordians who promised to aid and shelter any escaping slave who “should appear at their door.”2 The escape of Minkins”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“treachery” called “Ichabod.” And on March 22, writing under the extraordinary pressure of events and seething at what he saw as Webster’s betrayal, Whitman abandoned conventional metrical rhymed verse forms—forever—and wrote the first of his poems in the free verse that completely transformed his own work and would transform modern American poetry as much as the Civil War would transform American life. The poem appeared in the New York Tribune; it was called “Blood Money” and it cast Webster as Judas:”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“much as Emerson cared for Thoreau, praising his wit, his writing, and his love and knowledge of nature, he could not shut out this side of his character. “It is a misfortune of Thoreau’s that he has no appetite,” he noted. “He neither eats nor drinks. What can you have in common with a man who does not know the difference between ice cream and cabbage and who has no experience of wine or ale?” The exasperated Emerson observed that Thoreau “avoided commonplace, and talks birchbark to all comers, and reduces them all to the same insignificance.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“The estrangement was more profound than just one incident. Thoreau had no sympathy for Emerson’s new worldliness. He disapproved of his European travels; he seems to have enjoyed being in Emerson’s home and he must have felt displaced when Emerson returned. Emerson was now equally out of sympathy with Thoreau’s renunciations and withdrawals. If”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“As the Jardin des Plantes had shown him his way fifteen years earlier, so the revolutions of 1848 now showed him that his way had nothing to do with current events. “The world is always childish,” he wrote in his journal, “and with each gewgaw of a revolution or a new constitution that it finds, thinks it shall never cry any more.” What Emerson had to say was true only at the level of the individual, but he insisted that that level was the only one that mattered in the long run. “It is always becoming evident that the permanent good is for the soul only and cannot be retained in any society or system.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“Emerson’s sympathies were with the existing government on this occasion, that is, with the bourgeois government that had replaced Louis Philippe in February and in which the poet Lamartine held a major position. “I am heartily glad of the shopkeepers’ victory,” Emerson wrote on May 17. He understood that “this revolution has a feature new to history, that of socialism,” but he had little faith in socialism by now. “For the matter of socialism,” he wrote, “there are no oracles. The oracle is dumb. When we would pronounce anything truly of man, we retreat instantly on the individual.”13”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“The Chartist movement was named after the charter they wished to see adopted; it had six points: universal male suffrage, equal-sized constituencies, no property qualification for members of Parliament, a secret ballot, annual Parliaments, and salaries for MPs.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“the thirteenth century. When he was a very young man, the historical”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“Emerson’s master metaphor now is metamorphosis, a metaphor that for the next ten years will increasingly dominate his thinking and writing. Now in his journal he writes boldly, “Metamorphosis is nature,” and he balances this bold statement by saying that while life is “a flux of moods,” there is “that which changes not, and which ranks all sensations and states of mind.”6 The other idea Emerson took from Plotinus, an idea that blazed up in Emerson like fire in a dry forest, is Plotinus’s conception of the final stage in the developing self-consciousness of the individual soul. This last stage is a mystical union of the self with the One “in an ecstasy characterized by the absence of all duality.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“Emerson was particularly struck by two Neoplatonic teachings: the idea of the world as emanation and the idea of the ecstatic union with the One. For Plotinus everything emanates, or flows out,”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“Emerson was learning now to regard Pythagoras as the father of philosophy, “the first who called himself a ‘philosopher’ or lover of wisdom.” Plato was to be seen as “the most genuine and best of all his disciples.” Giordano Bruno was a modern Pythagoras, the “second Pythagoras.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“the all-in-each idea as two overlapping but still discrete tendencies. “Self-Reliance” affirms the tendency toward individuation. “The Oversoul” affirms the existence of “that great nature in which we rest.” This”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

“our own being, “that it [nature] is not only coherent but identical, and one and the same with our own immediate self-consciousness. To demonstrate this identity is the office and subject of his philosophy.”6”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire