EMERSON, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882), American poet and essayist
Action
Every noble activity makes room for itself.
Address
Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes. He has not the trouble of earning to own them: they solicit him to enter and possess.
Allegories
A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual process, will find that a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind with every thought which furnishes the vestment of the thought.—Hence good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories.
America
America is another name for opportunity. Our whole history appears like a last effort of divine Providence in behalf of the human race.
Anger
A man . . . makes his inferiors his superiors by heat.
Apologies
No sensible person ever made an apology.
Architecture
Greek architecture is the flowering of geometry.
Aristocracy
Some will always be above others.—Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.
Art
The artist ought never to perpetuate a temporary expression.
In sculpture did any one ever call the Apollo a fancy piece; or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? —A masterpiece of art has, to the mind, a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.
Authorship
Talent alone cannot make a writer; there must be a man behind the book.
Beauty
Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue.—Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.
Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting—a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.
Biography
Great men have often the shortest biographies.—Their real life is in their books or deeds.
There is properly no history, only biography.
Boasting
There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal.—Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.
Books
Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst.—They are good for nothing but to inspire.—I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.
Borrowing
The borrower runs in his own debt.
Brevity
The one prudence of life is concentration.
Cant
Cant is good to provoke common sense.
Character
Character is higher than intellect. . . , A great soul will be strong to live as well to think.
Do what you know and perception is converted into character.
Cheerfulness
To make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom. Goodness smiles to the last.
Choice
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.
Christ
An era in human history is the life of Jesus, and its immense influence for good leaves all the perversion and superstition that has accrued almost harmless.
Christianity
Christianity is the record of a pure and holy soul, humble, absolutely disinterested, a truth-speaker, and bent on serving, teaching, and uplifting men.— It teaches that to love the All-perfect is happiness.
Cities
Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.
Civilization
The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out.
A sufficient and sure method of civilization is the influence of good women.
The post office, with its educating energy, augmented by cheapness, and guarded by a certain religious sentiment
in mankind, so that the power of a wafer, or a drop of wax guards a letter, as it flies over sea and land, and bears it to its address as if a battalion of artillery had brought it, I look upon as a first measure of civilization.
Common Sense
No man is quite sane. Each has a vein of folly in his composition—a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which he has taken to heart.
Confidence
Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.
Self-trust is the essence of heroism.
Conservatism
We are reformers in spring and summer.—In autumn and winter we stand by the old.—Reformers in the morning; conservatives at night.—Reform is affirmative; conservatism, negative.—Conservatism goes for comfort; reform for truth.
Consideration
Consideration is the soil in which wisdom may be expected to grow, and strength be given to every upspringings plant of duty.
Consistency
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.—He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.
Conversation
Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.
Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student.
Courtesy
Life is not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.
We should be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of the best light.
The whole of heraldry and chivalry is in courtesy.—A man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could add.
Crime
There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue.—Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass.—Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge, and fox, and squirrel.
Custom
In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.
Cynics
Don't be a cynic, and bewail and bemoan.—Omit the negative propositions.—Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.—Set down nothing that will help somebody.
Definition
Just definitions either prevent or put an end to disputes.
Desire
There is nothing capricious in nature; and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feels it.
Discernment
The idiot, the Indian, the child, and the unschooled farmer's boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.
Discontent
Discontent is the want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will.
Dishonesty
Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he do not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well. He has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun.
Doctrine
Pure doctrine always bears fruit in pure benefits.
Duty
So nigh is grandeur to our dust, so near is God to man, when duty whispers low, "Thou must," the youth replies, "I can."
Education
The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.
That which we are we are all the while teaching, not voluntarily, but involuntarily.
Eloquence
There is no eloquence without a man behind it.
The pleasure of eloquence is, in greatest part, owing often to the stimulus of the occasion which produces it—to the magic of sympathy which exalts the feeling of each, by radiating on him the feeling of all.
Energy
This world belongs to the energetic.
The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.
Enthusiasm
Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is the triumph of enthusiasm.—Nothing great was ever achieved without it.
Eternity
All great natures delight in stability; all great men find eternity affirmed in the very promise of their faculties.
Evils
The first lesson of history, is, that evil is good.
Every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.—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.
Excelsior
While we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young.
Excess
There can be no excess to love, to knowledge, to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense.
Exertion
Every man's task is his life-preserver.
Eye
One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye; it transcends speech; it is the bodily symbol of identity.
Eyes are bold as lions, roving, running, leaping, here and there, far and near.—They speak all languages; wait for no introduction; ask no leave of age or rank; respect neither poverty nor riches, neither learning nor power, nor virtue, nor sex, but intrude, and come again, and go through and through you in a moment of time.—What inundation of life and thought is discharged from one soul into another through them!
An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled pistol, or can insult, like hissing or kicking; or in its altered mood, can, by beams of kindness, make the heart dance with joy.—Some eyes have no more expression than blueberries, while others are as deep as a well which you can fall into.
Face
There are faces so fluid with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, that we can hardly find what the mere features really are.—When the delicious beauty of lineaments loses its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has appeared—that an interior and durable form has been disclosed.
Faith
All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.
Fashion
Thus grows up fashion, an equivocal semblance; the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.
Fate
If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.
Flattery
We love flattery, even when we see through it, and are not deceived by it, for it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted.
Forgiveness
His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.
Friendship
We take care of our health, we lay up money, we make our roof tight and our clothing sufficient, but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting in the best property of all—friends?
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
Genius
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
Gentleman
The flowering of civilization is the finished man—the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power—the gentleman.
Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman—repose in energy.
We sometimes meet an original gentleman, who, if manners had not existed, would have invented them.
God
Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere.
Good Nature
Good nature is stronger than tomahawks.
Goodness
He who loves goodness harbors angels, reveres reverence, and lives with God.
Government
The less government we have the better—the fewer laws and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of private character, the growth of the individual.
Greatness
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion—it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who, in the midst of the world, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Haste
Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.
Health
The first wealth is health. Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve any one; it must husband its recources to live. But health answers its own ends, and has to spare; runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men's necessities.
What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of health.
Heroism
Self-trust is the essence of heroism.
Every man is a hero and an oracle to somebody, and to that, person, whatever he says, has an enhanced value.
Hope
Hope writes the poetry of the boy, but memory that of the man. Man looks forward with smiles, but backward with sighs. Such is the wise providence of God. The cup of life is sweetness at the brim—the flavor is impaired as we drink deeper, and the dregs are made bitter that we may not struggle when it is taken from our lips.
Humility
The street is full of humiliations to the proud.
Ignorance
Nothing is so indicative of deepest culture as a tender consideration of the ignorant.
Imitation
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. That which each can do best none but his Maker can teach him.
Immortality
Our dissatisfaction with any other solution is the blazing evidence of immortality.
We are much better believers in immortality than we can give grounds for.—The real evidence is too subtle, or is higher than we can write down in propositions.
Individuality
Every individual nature has its own beauty.—In every company, at every fireside, one is struck with the riches of nature, when he hears so many tones, all musical, sees in each person original manners which have a proper and peculiar charm, and reads new expressions of face.—He perceives that nature has laid for each the foundations of a divine building if the soul will build thereon.
Every great man is a unique.—The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part which he could not borrow.
Each mind hath its own method.—A true man never acquires after college rules.—What you have yourself aggregated in a natural manner surprises and delights when it is produced.—We cannot oversee each other's secret.
Influence
Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world.
To help the young soul, to add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame; to redeem defeat by new thought and firm action, this, though not easy, is the work of divine men.
Instinct
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.
Integrity
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.
Intellect
Intellect lies behind genius, which is intellect constructive. —Intellect is the simple power, anterior to all action or construction.
If a man's eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.
Invention
It is frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They have all been invented over and over fifty times. Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. He helps himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own structure, just so far as the need is.
Knowledge
People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am very content with knowing, if only I could know. That is an august entertainment, and would suffice me a great while. To know a little would be worth the expense of this world.
Labor
No way has been found for making heroism easy, even for the scholar. Labor, iron labor, is for him. The world was created as an audience for him; the atoms of which it is made are opportunities.
Liberty
If we must accept fate, we are not less compelled to assert liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.—We are sure, though we know not how, that necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times.
Libraries
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.
Life
Life is hardty respectable if it has no generous task, no duties or affections that constitute a necessity of existence. Every man's task is his life preserver.
Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess today the mood, the pleasure, the power of tomorrow, when we are building up our being.
Love
Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.
Love is strongest in pursuit; friendship in possession.
Love, and you shall be loved.—All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.
Luck
All successful men have agreed in being causationists; they believed that things were not by luck, but by law—that there was not a weak or cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things—the cause and effect.
Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances. It was somebody's name, or he happened to be there at the time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise.—Strong men believe in cause and effect.—The man was born to do it, and his father was born to be the father of him and of this deed, and by looking narrowly, you shall see there was no luck in the matter, but it was all a problem in arithmetic, or an experiment in chemistry.
Man
Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum. And here they will break out into their native music, and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns, and they mope and wallow like dogs!
A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no luster as you turn it in your hand until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors.
Manners
Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions. Elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth.
Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.
Coolness, and absence of heat and haste, indicate fine qualities. A gentleman makes no noise; a lady is serene.
I have seen manners that make a similar impression with personal beauty, that give the like exhilaration and refine us like that; and in memorable experiences they are certainly better than beauty, and make that superfluous and ugly. But they must be marked by fine perception, and must always showcontrol; you shall not be facile, apologetic, or leaky, but king over your word; and every gesture and action shall indicate power at rest. They must be inspired by the good heart. There is no beautifier of complexion, or form or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us.
The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius or a prodigious usefulness if you will hide the want of measure.
I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws, than with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic.
Nature is the best posture-master.
Master
The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.
Ministers
Men of God have always, from time to time, walked among men, and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.
Mob
A mob is a society of bodies, voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason, and traversing its work.—The mob is man, voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.—Its fit hour of activity is night; its actions are insane, like its whole constitution.
Money
The value of a dollar is to buy just things; a dollar goes on increasing in value with all the genius and all the virtue of the world. A dollar in a university is worth more than a dollar in a jail; in a temperate, schooled, law-abiding community, than in some sink of crime, where dice, knives, and arsenic are in constant play.
Morality
There can be no high civility without a deep morality.
Morning
I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions an angel might share.—The long, slender bars of cloud float, like fishes, in the sea of crimson light.—From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea.—I seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches me, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind.
Mother
Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckaback, why it does not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical discovery from that jobber.
Nature
Nature is a frugal mother, and never gives without measure. When she has work to do, she qualifies men for that and sends them equipped.
Nature is no sentimentalist—does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ships like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons.
Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep.
Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the One breaks in. everywhere.
Nobility
All nobility, in its beginnings, was somebody's natural superiority.
We must have kings, we must have nobles; nature is always providing such in every society, only let us have the real instead of the titular. In every society, some are bom to rule, and some to advise. The chief is the chief, all the world over, only not his cap and plume. It is only dislike of the pretender which makes men sometimes unjust to the true and finished man.
Occupation
The crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness.
Opinion
A man cannot utter two or three sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or in that of ideas and imagination, or in the realm of intuitions and duty.
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.
Opposition
Nature is upheld by antagonism.—Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We acquire the strength we have overcome.
The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat,—men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority, comes graceful and beloved as a bride!
A strenuous soul hates cheap success; it is the ardor of the assailant that makes the vigor of the defendant.
Oratory
An orator or author is never successful till he has learned to make his words smaller than his ideas.
Painting
The masters painted for joy, and knew riot that virtue had gone out of them. They could not paint the like in cold blood. The masters of English lyric wrote their songs so. It was a fine efflorescence of fine powers.
Passion
Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.
Past
The past is for us, but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the present.
Peace
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
Persecution
The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run uphill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob.
Plagiarism
It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled, thenceforth, to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can entertain it and of him who can adequately place it.—A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.
Politeness
Self-command is the main elegance.
Populace
This gives force to the strong, that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.
Power
There is always room for a man of force, and he makes room for many. Society is a troop of thinkers, and the best heads among them take the best places.
Prayer
Is not prayer a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite?—No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.
Preaching
Men of God have always, from time to time, walked among men, and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.
All things with which we deal preach to us. What is a farm but a mute Gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,—it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields.
Principles
The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of a disease which does not at once suggest a cure.
Progress
Progress is the activity of today and the assurance of tomorrow.
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.
Revolutions never go backwards.
The books which once we valued more than the apple of the eye, we have quite exhausted. What is that but, saying that we have come up with the point of view which the universal mind took through the eyes of one scribe; we have been that man, and have passed on.
Proverbs
Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions.
Prudence
The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation.
Punishment
Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens within the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.
Quotations
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.
A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good.—What he quotes he fills with his own voice and humor, and the whole cyclopedia of his table-talk is presently believed to be his own.
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in happy quotation than in the poem.
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we quote,—We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religions, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation.
In literature, quotation is good only when the writer whom I follow goes my way, and, being better mounted than I, gives me a cast, as we say; but if I like the gay equipage so well as to go out of my road, I had better have gone afoot.
Our best thoughts come from others.
Reading
One must be an inventor to read well.—As the proverb says, "He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies."—There is 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.
If we encountered a man of rare intellect we should ask him what books he read.
Reading should be in proportion to thinking, and thinking in proportion to reading.
Reform
We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter we stand by the old—reformers in the morning, conservatives at night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism is negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth.
Repose
Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman—repose in energy. The Greek battle pieces are calm; the heroes, in whatever violent actions engaged, retain a serene aspect.
Resolution
A good intention clothes itself with power.
Riches
Man was born to be rich, or grows rich by the use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players. Cultivated labor drives out brute labor.
Sabbath
The Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence.—It invites to the noblest solitude and to the noblest society.
Scepticism
Scepticism is slow suicide.
Science
Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology.
Science corrects the old creeds, sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile catechisms, and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses.
Self-Conceit
The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues the better we like him.
Self-Denial
Every personal consideration that we allow, costs us heavenly state. We sell the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent pleasure.
Selfishness
The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.
Self-Love
Self-love is, in almost all men, such an overweight that they are incredulous of a man's habitual preference of the general good to his own; but when they see it proved by sacrifices of ease, wealth, rank, and of life itself, there is no limit to their admiration.
Self-Reliance
The best lightning-rod for your protection is your own spine.
Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man.
Sentiment
Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debaucher of sentiment?
Silence
Let us be silent that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
What a strange power there is in silence! How many resolutions are formed, how many sublime conquests effected, during that pause when lips are closed, and the soul secretly feels the eye of her Maker upon her!—They are the strong ones of earth who know how to keep silence when it is a pain and grief unto them, and who give time to their own souls to wax strong against temptation.
Simplicity
Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.
Society
Society undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet; he has a fine Geneva watch, but cannot tell the hour by the sun.
Besides the general infusion of wit to heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual power is ever welcome in fine society, as the costliest addition to its rule and its credit.
There exists a strict relation between the class of power and the exclusive and polished circles. The last are always filled, or filling from the first. Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed; a kind of posthumous honor; a hall of the past. Great men are not commonly in its halls: they are absent in the field: they are working, not triumphing Fashion is made up of their children.
The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not happy in company, cannot find any word in his memory that will fit the occasion; all his information is a little impertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the conversation occasions for the introduction of what he has to say. The favorites of society are able men, and of more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly fill the hour and the company, contented and contenting.
Solitude
It is easy, in the world, to live after the world's opinion; it is easy, in solitude, to live after your own; but the great man is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who would inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.
Soul
The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul.
Specialty
A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors.—There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has his special talent, and the mastery of successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practised.
Stars
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
These preachers of beauty, which light the world with their admonishing smile.
Success
If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.
Talent
Talent for talent's sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.
Taxes
What a benefit would the government render to itself, and to every city, village, and hamlet in the States, if it would tax whiskey and rum almost to the point of prohibition! Was it Bonaparte who said that he found vices very good patriots? "He got five millions from the love of brandy, and he should be glad to know which of the virtues would pay him as much." Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give, and such harm as they do.
Temptation
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 temptations we resist.
Thought
Spiritual force is stronger than material; thoughts rule the world.
The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions.
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force—that thoughts rule the world.
A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection.
Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which are left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.
Thought is the property of those only who can entertain it.
When God lets loose a great thinker on this planet, then all things are at risk.—There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be turned tomorrow; nor any literary reputation, nor the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned.
Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.
There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power, and organizes a huge instrumentality of means.
Trifles
There is a kind of latent omniscience not only in every man, but in every particle.
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
Truth
The finest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed.
No truth so sublime but it may be seen to be trivial tomorrow in the light of new thoughts.
Every violation of truth is a stab at the health of human society.
The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.
Wealth
The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth; but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle, at all hazards, this love of power in the people lest civilization should be undone.
Well-Doing
Work, every hour, paid or unpaid; see only that thou work and thou canst not escape thy reward. Whether thy work be fine or coarse, planting corn, or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses, as well as to the thought. The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.
Words
No man has a prosperity so high or firm, but that two or three words can dishearten it; and there is no calamity which right words will not begin to redress.
A man cannot speak but he judges and reveals himself.—With his will, or against his will, he draws his portrait to the eye of others by every word.—Every opinion reacts on him who utters it.
It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.
Zeal
When we see an eager assailant of wrongs, a special reformer, we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your one virtue? Is virtue piecemeal?
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