Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. Educated at Harvard and the Cambridge Divinity School, he became a Unitarian minister in 1826 at the Second Church Unitarian. The congregation, with Christian overtones, issued communion, something Emerson refused to do. "Really, it is beyond my comprehension," Emerson once said, when asked by a seminary professor whether he believed in God. (Quoted in 2,000 Years of Freethought edited by Jim Haught.) By 1832, after the untimely death of his first wife, Emerson cut loose from Unitarianism. During a year-long trip to Europe, Emerson became acquainted with such intelligentsia as British writer Thomas Carlyle, and poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. He returned to the United States in 1833, to a life as poet, writer and lecturer. Emerson inspired Transcendentalism, although never adopting the label himself. He rejected traditional ideas of deity in favor of an "Over-Soul" or "Form of Good," ideas which were considered highly heretical. His books include Nature (1836), The American Scholar (1837), Divinity School Address (1838), Essays, 2 vol. (1841, 1844), Nature, Addresses and Lectures (1849), and three volumes of poetry. Margaret Fuller became one of his "disciples," as did Henry David Thoreau.
The best of Emerson's rather wordy writing survives as epigrams, such as the famous: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Other one- (and two-) liners include: "As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect" (Self-Reliance, 1841). "The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being" (Journal, 1836). "The word miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is a monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain" (Address to Harvard Divinity College, July 15, 1838). He demolished the right wing hypocrites of his era in his essay "Worship": ". . . the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons" (Conduct of Life, 1860). "I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship" (Self-Reliance). "The first and last lesson of religion is, 'The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are not seen are eternal.' It puts an affront upon nature" (English Traits , 1856). "The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant." (Civilization, 1862). He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity. D. 1882.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was his son and Waldo Emerson Forbes, his grandson.
“Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner.”
“Every calamity is a spur and a valuable hint.”
“A man's library is a sort of harem.”
“A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.”
“Don't trust children with edge tools. Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!”
“Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.”
“If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”
“Tis the good reader that makes the good book.”
“The never-ending task of self improvement.”
“If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.”
“Give me wine to wash me clean of the weather-stains of cares”
“So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the path of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours.”
“The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.”
“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.”
“A sufficient and sure method of civilization is in the influence of good women.”
“When I go into the garden with a spade and dig a bed I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.”
“Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.”
“Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language--not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.”
“It does not to dwell on dreams and forget to live, but it is equally foolish to ignore the past – never forget.”
“The ruin or blank, that we see when we look at nature is in our own eye...Love is as much its demand, as perception. Indeed neither can be perfect without the other.”
“Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use...In God, every end is converted into a new means.”
“What I need is someone who will make me do what I can.”
“I am sure of this, that 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.”
“Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.”
“We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.”
“Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.”
“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”
“Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.”
“The day is always (hers or) his, who works in it with serenity and great aims.”
“Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.”
“A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.”
“Love, and you shall be loved.”
“Thou art to me a delicious torment.”
“Hidup ini tidak terlalu pendek, jadi kita memiliki banyak kesempatan untuk berbuat baik.”
“Jangan sia-siakan waktu anda untuk ragu-ragu dan takut.Laksanakanlah pekerjaan yang ada di depan mata, sebab tugas asaat ini yang dilaksanakan dengan sebaik-baiknya akan menjadi persiapan terbaik untuk masa-masa yang akan datang.”
“Sesuatu yang hebat tidak bisa dicapai tanpa semangat yang besar.”
“Satu-satunya cara untuk mendapat sahabat ialah dengan menjadi sahabat.”
“Keep your friendships in repair.”
“We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.”
“Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.”
“The reward of a thing well done is having done it.”
“O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.”
“Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.”
“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
“Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee.”
“Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside.”
“Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.”
“Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself.”
“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.”
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”