Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the lier, but is a stab at the health of human society. On the most profitable lie the course of events presently lays a destructive tax; whilst frankness invited frankness, puts the parties on a convenient footing, makes their business a friendship. Emerson.

PostCultural Blues - Emerson-citater

                          »I am primarily engaged to myself to be a public servant of all the gods, to
                          demonstrate to all men that there is intelligence and good will at the heart of
                          things, and ever higher and yet higher leadings.«
                          -- Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature; Addresses, and Lectures, The Conservative

          »Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies,
          histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face;
          we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
          Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a
          religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in
          nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers
          they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones
          of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The
          sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands,
          new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.«
          -- Nature, Introduction (i: Nature; Addresses, and Lectures)

          »Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at
          risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what
          is safe, or where it will end.«
          -- Essays: First Series, Self-Reliance

          »What greater calamity can fall upon a nation, than the loss of worship? Then all things
          go to decay. Genius leaves the temple, to haunt the senate, or the market. Literature
          becomes frivolous. Science is cold. The eye of youth is not lighted by the hope of other
          worlds, and age is without honor. Society lives to trifles, and when men die, we do not
          mention them.«
          -- Nature; Addresses, and Lectures, The Divinity School Address (Gud forbyde at en
          sådan vanskæbne nogensinde måtte vederfares Dannevang! ...)

          »I like man, but not men.«
          -- Journal, -/3 1846

          »Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.
          Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree for the better securing of
          his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue
          in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and
          creators, but names and customs.
                Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal
          palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be
          goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to
          yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when
          quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me
          with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the
          sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested, - 'But these
          impulses may be from below, not from above.' I replied, 'They do not seem to me to be
          such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil.' No law can be sacred to
          me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that
          or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A
          man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and
          ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and
          names, to large societies and dead institutions.«
          -- Essays: First Series, Self-Reliance

          »Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, the
          mere air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose, expresses character. If you act, you
          show character; if you sit still, if you sleep, you show it. You think, because you have
          spoken nothing when others spoke, and have given no opinion on the times, on the
          church, on slavery, on marriage, on socialism, on secret societies, on the college, on
          parties and persons, that your verdict is still expected with curiosity as a reserved
          wisdom. Far otherwise; your silence answers very loud. You have no oracle to utter, and
          your fellow-men have learned that you cannot help them; for, oracles speak. Doth not
          wisdom cry, and understanding put forth her voice?«
          -- Essays: First Series, Spiritual Laws

          »Where there is no vision, the people perish.«
          -- Nature; Addresses, and Lectures, The Method of Nature

          »There is no great and no small
          To the Soul that maketh all:
          And where it cometh, all things are;
          And it cometh everywhere.«
          -- Essays: First Series, epigraf til History

          »The secret of poetry is never explained, - is always new. We have not got farther than
          mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, and the eternity it inherits.«
          -- Journal, -/11 1874

          »Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled
          nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man,
          the sun; from woman, the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions
          externized themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having
          made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the veins and
          veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees, that the structure still fits him, but fits him
          colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high.
          He adores timidly his own work. Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the
          follower of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at himself
          and his house, and muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt him and it. He
          perceives that if his law is still paramount, if still he have elemental power, if his word is
          sterling yet in nature, it is not conscious power, it is not inferior but superior to his will. It
          is Instinct.«
          -- Nature, Prospects (i: Nature; Addresses, and Lectures)

          »Language is fossil poetry.«
          -- Essays: Second Series, The Poet

          »Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate
          religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the
          soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells,
          with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It
          invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences
          but those of spontaneous love.«
          -- Nature; Addresses, and Lectures, The Divinity School Address

          »Hitch your wagon to a star.«
          -- Society and Solitude, Civilization

          »To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At
          least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but
          shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and
          outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of
          infancy even into the era of manhood.«
          -- Nature, Nature (i: Nature; Addresses, and Lectures)

          »When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it. Follow the great man,
          and you shall see what the world has at heart in these ages. There is no omen like that.«

          -- Nature; Addresses, and Lectures, The Method of Nature

          »The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water
          flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain,
          and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to
          that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us.
                I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our
          fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.
          Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and
          playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our
          philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all
          our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.«
          -- Essays: Second Series, Experience

          »The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a
          projection of his own soul, which he admires.«
          -- Nature; Addresses, and Lectures, Literary Ethics

          »A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and
          philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He
          may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in
          hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it
          contradict every thing you said to-day. - 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' -
          Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? ... To be great is to be misunderstood.«
          -- Essays: First Series, Self-Reliance

          »The world is his, who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind
          custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance, - by your
          sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.«
          -- Nature; Addresses, and Lectures, The American Scholar

          »We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us
          represents.«
          -- Essays: First Series, Self-Reliance

          »No dissenter rides in his coach for three generations; he infallibly falls into the
          Establishment.«
          -- Journal, 24/12 1847

          »In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what
          period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these
          plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and
          the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we
          return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, - no disgrace, no
          calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare
          ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean
          egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of
          the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the
          nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: To be brothers, to be acquaintances,
          - master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and
          immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in
          streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the
          horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.«
          -- Nature, Nature (i: Nature; Addresses, and Lectures)

          »The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is
          disunited with himself.«
          -- Nature, Prospects (i: Nature; Addresses, and Lectures)

          »It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'Always do what you
          are afraid to do.'«
          -- Essays: First Series, Heroism

          »A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason, and
          traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its
          fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane like its whole constitution. It persecutes a
          principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and
          outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these. It resembles the prank
          of boys, who run with fire-engines to put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The
          inviolate spirit turns their spite against the wrongdoers. The martyr cannot be
          dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison, a more illustrious
          abode; every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or
          expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side. Hours of sanity and
          consideration are always arriving to communities, as to individuals, when the truth is
          seen, and the martyrs are justified.«
          -- Essays: First Series, Compensation

          »All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle.«
          -- Journal, 5/9 1854

          »The influence of the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to that degree,
          that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to
          speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and space
          are but inverse measures of the force of the soul.«
          -- Essays: First Series, The Over-Soul

          »Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music.«
          -- Essays: Second Series, The Poet

          »From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware
          that we are nothing, but the light is all.«
          -- Essays: First Series, The Over-Soul

          »The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that
          the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as
          a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a
          true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake.«
          -- Nature; Addresses, and Lectures, The Divinity School Address

          »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 these books.
                Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned
          class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but
          as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of
          readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.«
          -- Nature; Addresses, and Lectures, The American Scholar

          »Every spirit makes its house; but afterwards the house confines the spirit.«
          -- The Conduct of Life, Fate

          »Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a
          heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect.
          What we are, that only can we see.«
          -- Nature, Prospects (i: Nature; Addresses, and Lectures)

          »Do not waste yourself in rejection; do not bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of
          the good.«
          -- Journal, -/7 1841

          »The disease with which the human mind now labors, is want of faith. Men do not
          believe in a power of education. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in
          man, and we do not try. We renounce all high aims. We believe that the defects of so
          many perverse and so many frivolous people, who make up society, are organic, and
          society is a hospital of incurables. A man of good sense but of little faith, whose
          compassion seemed to lead him to church as often as he went there, said to me; 'that
          he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on.'
          I am afraid the remark is too honest, and comes from the same origin as the maxim of
          the tyrant, 'If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused.' I notice too, that
          the ground on which eminent public servants urge the claims of popular education is
          fear: 'This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must
          educate them to keep them from our throats.' We do not believe that any education, any
          system of philosophy, any influence of genius, will ever give depth of insight to a
          superficial mind. Having settled ourselves into this infidelity, our skill is expended to
          procure alleviations, diversion, opiates. We adorn the victim with manual skill, his tongue
          with languages, his body with inoffensive and comely manners. So have we cunningly
          hid the tragedy of limitation and inner death we cannot avert. Is it strange that society
          should be devoured by a secret melancholy, which breaks through all its smiles, and all
          its gayety and games?«
          -- Essays: Second Series, New England Reformers

          »An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.«
          -- Essays: First Series, Self-Reliance

          »Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who
          can enjoy what they find, without question. Nature hates peeping, and our mothers
          speak her very sense when they say, 'Children, eat your victuals, and say no more of it.'
          To fill the hour, - that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance
          or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.
          Under the oldest mouldiest conventions, a man of native force prospers just as well as in
          the newest world, and that by skill of handling and treatment. He can take hold anywhere.
          Life itself is a mixture of power and form, and will not bear the least excess of either. To
          finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest
          number of good hours, is wisdom.«
          -- Essays: Second Series, Experience

          »The perpetual admonition of nature to us, is, 'The world is new, untried. Do not believe
          the past. I give you the universe a virgin to-day.'«
          -- Nature; Addresses, and Lectures, Literary Ethics

          »Every hero becomes a bore at last.«
          -- Representative Men, Uses of Great Men

          »For, the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not
          diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them, and
          proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed. We
          first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in
          nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of
          thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which
          cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence,
          which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity.«
          -- Essays: First Series, Self-Reliance

          »The highest revelation is that God is in every man.«
          -- Journal, 8/9 1833

          »To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events
          profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the
          circumstance. Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth,
          teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.«
          -- Essays: First Series, History (første sætning brugte Nietzsche som motto til
          1882-udgaven af Die fröhliche Wissenschaft)

          »Fear always springs from ignorance.«
          -- Nature; Addresses, and Lectures, The American Scholar

          »It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist.
          That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments.
          We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means
          of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the
          amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps
          there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new
          power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters,
          religions, - objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature and
          literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which
          we cast.«
          -- Essays: Second Series, Experience

          »My life is a May game, I will live as I like. I defy your strait-laced, weary, social ways and
          modes. Blue is the sky, green the fields and groves, fresh the springs, glad the rivers,
          and hospitable the splendor of sun and star. I will play my game out.«
          -- Journal, 6/6 1839

          »Every man is a channel through which heaven floweth.«
          -- Essays: Second Series, Nominalist and Realist

          »Shall we judge the country by the majority or by the minority? Certainly, by the minority.
          The mass are animal, in state of pupilage, and nearer the chimpanzee.«
          -- Journal, -/4? 1854

          »The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and
          inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious. But it differs from the
          body in one important respect. It is not, like that, now subjected to the human will. Its
          serene order is inviolable by us. It is, therefore, to us, the present expositor of the divine
          mind. It is a fixed point whereby we may measure our departure. As we degenerate, the
          contrast between us and our house is more evident. We are as much strangers in
          nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and
          the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more
          than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape,
          every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him?«
          -- Nature, Spirit (i: Nature; Addresses, and Lectures)

          »Love, and you shall be loved.«
          -- Essays: First Series, Compensation

          »Why should all virtue work in one and the same way? Why should all give dollars? It is
          very inconvenient to us country folk, and we do not think any good will come of it. We
          have not dollars; merchants have; let them give them. Farmers will give corn; poets will
          sing; women will sew; laborers will lend a hand; the children will bring flowers.«
          -- Essays: First Series, Spiritual Laws

          »It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his
          possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect
          doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of
          power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by
          unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and
          circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is
          thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and
          animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks
          somewhat wildly, or, "with the flower of the mind;" not with the intellect, used as an organ,
          but with the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from its
          celestial life; or, as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect
          alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way,
          throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his
          road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in
          any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature,
          the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is
          possible.«
          -- Essays: Second Series, The Poet

          »It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits
          the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in.«
          -- Journal, 20/5 1843

          »I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.«
          -- Journal, -/5 1849
 
 
 
"the first wealth is health" Ralph Waldo Emerson