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.
“Only so much of life do I know as I have lived. ”
“Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.”
“Nothing is so strong as gentleness nothing so gentle as real strength”
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
“The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going”
“Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.”
“The surest poison is time.”
“Every[one] I meet is in some way my superior.”
“Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.”
“Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.”
“If a man is at once acquainted with the geometric foundation of things and with their festal splendor, his poetry is exact and his arithmetic musical.”
“A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.”
“Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.”
“With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.”
“Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.”
“I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable.”
“Books are for nothing but to inspire”
“The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.”
“A great man is always willing to be little.”
“Patience and fortitude conquer all things.”
“Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startles out wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.”
“The wise man in the storm prays God not for safety from danger but for deliverance from fear.”
“Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.”
“The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.”
“When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practical man relies on the language of the first.”
“Not the sun or summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight.”
“He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the house of Pain.”
“Good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.”
“Men are respectable only as they respect.”
“Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes much impression on him, and another none.”
“On him the light of star and moon Shall fall with purer radiance down...Him Nature giveth for defenceHis formidable innocencn;The mounting sap, the shells, the sea,All spheres, all stonse, his helpers be...”
“The First wealth is health.”
“Do not say things. Who you are thunders over you all the while so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.”
“a good reader makes a good book”
“This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”
“The ancestor of every action is a thought.”
“If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.”
“The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.”
“Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.”
“Language is fossil Poetry.”
“The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.”
“All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.”
“The foremost watchman on the peak announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken, and the phrase will be th fittest, most musical, and the unerring voice of the world for that time.”
“We are never tired so long as we can see far enough.”
“A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best.”
“That which we call sin in others is experiment for us.”
“Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul”
“Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.”
“The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.”
“Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams”