Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
American philosopher, essayist, and poet.
You must read Plato. But you must hold him at arm's length and say, 'Plato, you have delighted and edified mankind for two thousand years. What have you to say to me?'
There are two laws discrete
Not reconciled,
Law for man, and law for thing.
Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.
Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the fruit of his character.
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.
The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.
The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.
Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.
Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.
Every really able man, in whatever direction he work,—a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter,—if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be.
I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think. I observe that difference, and shall observe it. One day I shall know the value and law of this discrepance. But I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize the world of thought.
What is there in 'Paradise Lost' to elevate and astonish like Herschel or Somerville?
Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
The years teach much which the days never know.
When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions. Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God have, from time to time, walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.
Though love repine, and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply, —
"'Tis man's perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die."
I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.
Every man is wanted and no man is wanted much.