Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essays: First Series (1841)

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What connection do the books show between the fifty or sixty chemical elements and the historical eras?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Generalization is always a new influx of divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill that attends it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact thatall nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The root of the plant is not unsightly to science...

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Show us an arc of the curve, and a good mathematician will find out the whole figure. We are always reasoning from the seen to the unseen.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her works and delights in startling us with resemblances in the most unexpected quarters.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey, it will yield us bees.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing astonished men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough today to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt it, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Circles, like the soul, are neverending and turn round and round without a stop

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Power is in nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything in nature contains all the powers of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind and when the same thought occurs in another man, it is the key to that era.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only biography.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but though his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Ralph Waldo Emerson