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.
“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.”
“Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows.”
“We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly are.”
“Thought is the property of those only who can entertain it. -”
“The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.”
“Believe in yourself our strength grows out of our weakness”
“There is a crack in everything God has made”
“Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
“The life of truth is cold.”
“Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.”
“To fill the hour,—that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.”
“All history is biography.”
“In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.”
“The wise man through an excess of wisdom is made a fool.”
“The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.”
“Our thinking is a pious reception.”
“Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none.”
“I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints”
“Man is a piece of the universe made alive”
“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”
“Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.”
“the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
“Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.”
“Der beste Weg, einen Freund zu haben, ist der, selbst einer zu sein.”
“Glück ist ein Parfüm, das du nicht auf andere sprühen kannst, ohne selbst ein paar Tropfen abzubekommen.”
“Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. ”
“The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.”
“The days come and go but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.”
“For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?”
“He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.”
“The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if it all depended on this particular up or down.”
“When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.”
“Turn the eye upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years!”
“A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engrafted with a foreign stock.”
“An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth, —"He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.”
“لم يتحقق شئ عظيم بدون حماس”
“As soon as there is life there is danger. ”
“Every man contemplates an angel in his future self”
“Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology.”
“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.”
“Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same”
“Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it”
“Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.”
“The poets made all the words and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.”
“Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.”
“It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.”
“Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.”
“So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man,When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth whispers, 'I can.”
“In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire.”
“There may be two or three or four steps, according to the genius of each, but for every seeing soul there are two absorbing facts, --I and the abyss.”