Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essays: First Series (1841)

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Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something. If riches increase, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Travelling 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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, — see how it could and must be.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tomorrow will be like today. Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think that our popular theology has gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has displaced. But men are better than this theology. Their daily life gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the doctrine behind him in his own experience; and all men feel sometimes the falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. For men are wiser than they know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits without after-thought, if said in conversation, would probably be questioned in silence. If a man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the divine laws, he is answered by a silence which conveys well enough to an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to make his own statement.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of all debts, men are least willing to pay taxes. What a satire is this on government!

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

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

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

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

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

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

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the end it shall ripen into truth, and you shall know why you believe.

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