Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
These are great essays and I hope I can write more in-depth reviews on them at a later date. |
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Self Reliance
The Poet
"We were put into our bodies, as
fire is put into a pan, to be carried about; but there is
no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the
organ"p.65
"the highest minds of the world have never ceased to
explore the double meaning, or shall I say, the quadruple
the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every
sensuous fact"p.66
"The young man reveres men of genius, because, to
speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They
receive of the soul as he also receives, but they more.
Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving
men"p.66
"the great majority of men seem to be minors, who
have not yet come into possession of their own, or mutes,
who cannot report the conversation they have had with
nature."p.66
"Every man should be so much an artist, that he
could report in conversation what had befallen him. Yet,
in our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient
force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach
the quick, and compel the reproduction of themselves in
speech. The poet is the person in whom these powers are
in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and
handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole
scale of experience, and its representative of man, in
virtue of being the largest power to receive and to
impart."66-77
"For the Universe has three children, born at one
time, which reappear, under different names, in every
system of thought, whether they be called cause,
operation, and affect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto,
Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and
the Son, but which we will call here, the Knowert, the
Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the
love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of
beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he is
essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed,
and each of these three has the power of the others
latent in him, and his own patent.
"The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents
beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the center. For
the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the
beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful
things, but Beauty is the creator of the
universe."p.67
"For poetry was all written before time was, and
whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate
in to that region where the air is music, we hear those
primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we
lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute
something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men
of more delicate ear write down these cadences more
faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect,
become the songs of the nations.. For nature is as truly
beautiful as it is good, or as it is reasonable, and must
as much appear, as it must be done, or be known. Words
and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine
energy. Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of
words."p.67
"I took part in a conversation the other say,
concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle
mind, whose head appeared to be a music-box of delicate
tunes and rhythms, and whose skill, and command of
language, we could not sufficiently praise. But when the
question arose, whether he was not only a lyrist, but a
poet, we were obliged to confess that he is plainly a
contemporary, not an eternal man."p.68
"We hear, through all the varied music, the
ground-tone of conventional life. Our poets are men of
talents who sing, and not the children of music. The
argument is secondary, the finish of the versus is
primary."p.68
"The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new
experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with
him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For,
the experience of each new age requires a new confession,
and the world seems always waiting for its poet."
"With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I
confide in as an inspiration! And now my chains are to be
broken; I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs
in which I live,--opaque, though they seem
transparent,--and from the heavens of truth I shall see
and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to
life, and renovate nature, to see trifles animated by a
tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more
be a noise; not I shall see men and women, and know the
signs by which they may be discerned from fools and
Satan's. This day shall be better than my birth-day: then
I became an animal: now I am invited into the science of
the real. Such is the hope, but the fruition is
postponed. Oftener it falls, that this winged man, who
will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into the clouds,
then leaps and frisks about with me from cloud to cloud,
still affirming that he is bound heavenward; and I, being
myself a novice, am slow in perceiving that he does not
know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I
should admire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a flying
fish, a little way from the ground or the water; but the
all-piercing, all-feeding, and ocular air of heaven, that
man shall never inhabit. I tumble down again into my old
nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, and
have lost my faith in the possibility of any guide who
can lead me thither where I would be."p.69
"Things admit of being used a symbols, because
nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part.
Every line we can draw in the sand, has expression; and
there is no body without its spirit or genius. All form
is an effect of character; all conditions, of the quality
of the life; all harmony, of health; (and, for this
reason, a perception of beauty should be sympathetic, or
proper only to the good). The beautiful rests on the
foundations of the necessary. The soul makes the
body"p.70
"We stand before the secret of the world, there
where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into
Variety."
"science always goes abreast with the just elevation
of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics,
or, the state of science is an index of our
self-knowledge. Since everything in nature answers to a
moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it
is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not
yet active."
"every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of
these enchantments of nature: for all men have the
thoughts whereof the universe is the celebration. I find
that the fascination resides in the symbol. Who loves
nature? Who does not? Is it only poets, and men of
leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No; but also
hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they
express their affection in their choice of life, and not
in their choice of words."
"His worship is sympathetic; he has no definitions,
but he is commanded in nature, by the living power which
he feels to be there present. No imitation, or playing of
these things, would content him; he loves the earnest of
the north wind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and iron. A
beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty which we
can see to the end of. It is nature the symbol, nature
certifying the supernatural, body overflowed by life,
which he worships, with coarse, but sincere
rites."p.71
"The poorest experience is rich enough for all the
purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of
new facts?"p.71
"Readers of poetry see the factory-village, and the
railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is
broken up by these; for these works of art are not yet
consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall
within the great Order not less than the bee-hive, or the
spider's geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast
into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she
loves like her own."p.72
"As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through
the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and
shows us all things in their right series and procession.
For, through that better perception, he stands one step
nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis;
perceives that thought is multiform; that within the form
of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into
a higher form; and, following with his eyes the life,
uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech
flows with the flowing of nature."p.73
"What we call nature, is a certain self-regulated
motion, or change; and nature does all things by her own
hands, and does not leave another to baptize her, but
baptizes herself; and this through the metamorphosis
again."p.73
"She makes a man; and having brought him to ripe
age, she will no longer run the risk of losing this
wonder at a blow, but she detaches from him a new self,
that the kind may be safe from accidents to which the
individual is exposed. So when the soul of the poet has
come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away
from it its poems or songs,--a fearless, sleepless,
deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents
of the weary kingdom of time: a fearless, vivacious
offspring, clad with wings(such was the virtue of the
soul out of which they came), which carry them fast and
far, and infix them irrecoverably in to the hearts of
men. These wings are the beauty of the poet's soul. The
songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal parent ,
are pursued by clamorous flights of censures, which swarm
in far greater numbers, and threaten to devour them; but
these last are not winged. At the end of a very short
leap they fall plump down, and rot, having received from
the souls out of which they came no beautiful wings. But
the melodies of the poet ascend, and leap, and pierce
into the deeps of infinite time."p.74
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"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."p.75
"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."p.75
"The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of
the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or
of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple
soul in a clean and chaste body."p.76
"I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting
he transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed
and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he
forgets the authors and the public, and heeds only his
one dream, which holds him like an insanity, let me read
his paper"p.78
"how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to
the intellect the power to sap and upheave nature: how
great the perspective! Nations, times, systems, enter and
disappear, like threads in tapestry of large figure and
many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and, while the
drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed, our philosophy,
our religion, in our opulence."
"On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we
are miserably dying. The inaccessibleness of every
thought but that we are in, is wonderful. What if you
come near to it-you are as remote, which you are nearest,
as when you are farthest. Every thought is also a prison;
every heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the
poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode,
or in an action, or in looks and behavior, has yielded us
a new thought. He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a
new scene."
"But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and
not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the color, or the
form, but read their meaning, neither may he rest in this
meaning, but he makes the same objects exponents of his
new thought."
"Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands
eminently for the translator of nature into thought. I do
not know the man in history to whom things stood so
uniformly for words. Before him the metamorphosis
continually plays. Everything on which his eye rests,
obeys the impulses of moral nature. The figs become
grapes whilst he eats them. When some of his angels
affirmed a truth, the laurel twig which they held
blossomed in their hands. The noise which, at a distance,
appeared like gnashing and thumping, on coming nearer was
found to be the voice of disputants. The men, in one of
his visions, seen in heavenly light, appeared like
dragons, and seemed in darkness: but, to each other, they
appeared as men, and, when the light from heaven shone
into their cabin, they complained of the darkness, and
were compelled to shut the window that they might
see."p.79
"We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient
profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we
chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we
filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from
celebrating it."p.80
"Art is the path of the creator to his work. The
paths, or methods, are ideal and eternal, though few men
ever see them, not the artist himself for years, or for a
lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. … to
express themselves symmetrically and abundantly, not
dwarfishly and fragmentarily."p.80
"He hears a voice , he sees a becokoning. Then he is
apprised, with wonder, what herds of daemons hem him in.
He can no more rest; he says, with the old painter,
"By God, it is in me, and must go forth of me."
He pursues a beauty, half seen, which flies before him.
The poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of the
things he says are conventional, no doubt; but by and by
he says something which is original and beautiful. That
charms him. He would say nothing else but such
things."p.81
"Once having tasted this immortal ichor, he cannot
have enough of it"
"Stand there, baulked and dumb, stuttering and
stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until,
at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which
every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending
all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is
the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Nothing
walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in
turn arise and walk before him as exponent of his
meaning. Comes he to that power, his genius is no longer
exhaustible."
"O poet! A new nobility is conferred in grooves and
pastures, and not in castles, or by the sword-blade, any
longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt
leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not
know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or
opinions of men, but shalt take all from the
muse."p.81
"And this is thy reward: that the ideal shall be
real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world
shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not
troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have
the whole land for thy park and manor, the see for thy
bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the
woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt
possess that wherein others are only tenants and
boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord!
Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly,
wherever day and night been in twilight, wherever the
blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars,
wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever
are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and
awe, and love, there is Beauty, plentous as rain, shed
for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over,
thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or
ignoble.