Transcendent Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Wikipedia Summary for Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay "Nature". Following this work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence."Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays "Self-Reliance", "The Over-Soul", "Circles", "The Poet", and "Experience." Together with "Nature", these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.
Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." Emerson is one of several figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world."He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him. "In all my lectures," he wrote, "I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man." Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist. in 1867, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.
Whatever you do, you need courage.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.
Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective store?
Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.
For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
All the world loves a lover.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
All the world loves a lover, but how it does laugh at his love letters.
Be not the slave of your own past.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
Traveling is a fool's paradise.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
Nature never hurries. Atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work. The lesson one learns from yachting or planting is the manners of Nature; patience with the delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather, excess or lack of water.
The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
We are always getting ready to live but never living.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
We are always getting ready to live, but never living... The wave moves onward but the particles of which it is composed do not... It cannot be but that at intervals throughout society there are real men intermixed . . . as the carpenter puts one iron bar in his bannister for every five or six wooden ones.
The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.
We aim above the mark to hit the mark.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
We aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it.
To fill the hour--that is happiness.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
To fill the hour; that is happiness to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.
It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'Always do what you are afraid to do.
We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can receive anything from love, forthat is a way of receiving it from ourselves; but not from any one who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in living it.
Men love to wonder and that is the seed of our science.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science, and such is the mechanical determination of our age, and so recent are our best contrivances, that use has not dulled our joy and pride in them. These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a godlike ease and power.
Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only true gift is a portion of thyself.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a stone; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing.
Concentration is the secret of strength.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.
If you learn only methods, you'll be tied to your methods but if you learn principles you can devise your own methods.
Happy will that house be in which the relationships are formed from character.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Happy will that house be in which the relations are formed from character; after the highest, and not after the lowest order; the house in which character marries, and not confusion and a miscellany of unavowable motives.
Pride ruined the angels.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Pride ruined the angels, Their shame them restores; And the joy that is sweetest Lurks in stings of remorse.
Nature is upheld by antagonism.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Nature is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We acquire the strength we have overcome.
The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
There are men too superior to be seen except by a few, as there are notes too high for the scale of most ears.
The life of man is a self-evolving circle.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul.
The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine alike of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all the members.
Prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good, is vicious.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Prayer that craves a particular commodity—anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg.
Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience.
The best of life is conversation.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
The best of life is conversation, and the greatest success is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people.
The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.
Knowledge, Virtue, Power are the victories of man over his necessities, his march to the dominion of the world.
Eloquence shows the power and possibility of man.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
lEloquence shows the power and possibility of man. There is one of whom we took no note, but on a certain occasion it appears that he has a secret virtue never suspected - that he can paint what has occurred and what must occur, with such clearness to a company, as if they saw it done before their eyes. By leading their thought he leads their will, and can make them do gladly what an hour ago they would not believe that they could be led to do at all.
Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.
Life is a festival only to the wise.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimneyside of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front.
The frost which kills the harvest of a year saves the harvest of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
The frost which kills the harvest of a year, saves the harvests of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust. Wars, fires, plagues, break up immovable routine, clear the ground of rotten races and dens of distemper, and open a fair field to new men. There is a tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shatters a rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order. The sharpest evils are bent into that periodicity which makes the errors of planets, and the fevers and distempers of men, self-limiting. Nature is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We acquire the strength we have overcome. Without war, no soldier; without enemies, no hero.
The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of skepticism.
The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. ... In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.
Very idle is all curiosity concerning other people's estimate of us, and all fear of remaining unknown is not less so.
The health of the eye demands a horizon.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
Universities are of course hostile to geniuses.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.
It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to one. The faith that stands on authority is not faith.
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