## Metadata - Author: [[Ralph Waldo Emerson, Brooks Atkinson, and Mary Oliver]] - Full Title: The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson - Category: #books ## Highlights - It is one of those fables which out of an unknown antiquity convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end. ([Location 905](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=905)) - The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions; it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing. ([Location 951](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=951)) - As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. ([Location 957](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=957)) - Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. ([Location 971](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=971)) - Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must—when the sun is hid and the stars withdraw their shining—we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. ([Location 985](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=985)) - It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads. ([Location 989](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=989)) - There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that as the seer’s hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. ([Location 1000](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1000)) - I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. ([Location 1023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1023)) - If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town; in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. ([Location 1044](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1044)) - When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended and books are a weariness—he has always the resources to live. Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart his truths? He can still fall back on this elemental force of living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. ([Location 1053](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1053)) - Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this’ particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time—happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly. ([Location 1084](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1084)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold is there only by sufferance—by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow. ([Location 1105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1105)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the world who give the color of their present thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great thing. Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table. Linnæus makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman; Davy, chemistry; and Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his who works in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon. ([Location 1110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1110)) - The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. ([Location 1132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1132)) - Each philosopher, each bard, each actor has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. ([Location 1133](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1133)) - First, one, then another, we drain all cisterns, and waxing greater by all these supplies, we crave a better and more abundant food. The man has never lived that can feed us ever. ([Location 1136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1136)) - It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men. ([Location 1138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1138)) - That which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign—is it not?—of new vigor when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet. ([Location 1159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1159)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit; not to be reckoned one character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? ([Location 1199](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1199)) - Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear you witness. ([Location 1249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1249)) - Note: vouchers / vultures - could be an interesting pun - The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. ([Location 1302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1302)) - The snow-storm was real, the preacher merely spectral, and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. ([Location 1377](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1377)) - Imitation cannot go above its model. 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 ([Location 1447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1447)) - Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things, when every voice is raised for a new road or another statute or a subscription of stock; for an improvement in dress, or in dentistry; for a new house or a larger business; for a political party, or the division of an estate; will you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable? ([Location 1771](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=1771)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age. ([Location 2018](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2018)) - Each new law and political movement has a meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say, ‘Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.’ ([Location 2021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2021)) - The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. ([Location 2044](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2044)) - He should see that he can live all history in his own person. He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the government of the world; ([Location 2049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2049)) - What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events? In splendid variety these changes come, all putting questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is truly man. ([Location 2264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2264)) - 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. ([Location 2390](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2390)) - No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. ([Location 2395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2395)) - 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. ([Location 2422](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2422)) - A man must consider what a blind-man’s-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect I anticipate your argument. ([Location 2427](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2427)) - For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The bystanders look askance on him in the public street or in the friend’s parlor. If this aversion had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. ([Location 2439](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2439)) - The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loth to disappoint them. ([Location 2447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2447)) - A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. ([Location 2454](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2454)) - Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.—’Ah, ([Location 2456](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2456)) - There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. ([Location 2466](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2466)) - The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. They shed a united light on the advancing actor. ([Location 2472](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2472)) - Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design; and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. A man Cæsar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. ([Location 2486](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2486)) - Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. ([Location 2682](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2682)) - The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen. ([Location 2948](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=2948)) - And yet 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. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances and the reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighborhoods of men. ([Location 3053](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=3053)) - Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one, on that side all obstruction is taken away and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea. ([Location 3153](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=3153)) - A man’s genius, the quality that differences him from every other, the susceptibility to one class of influences, the selection of what is fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit, determines for him the character of the universe. A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him wherever he goes. He takes only his own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles round him. ([Location 3181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=3181)) - He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. ([Location 3268](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QJZ9OK&location=3268))