The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: With a Biographical Introduction and Notes, Volume 1

Front Cover
Riverside Press, 1904
 

Contents

I
1
II
79
III
117
IV
153
V
189
VI
225
VII
257
VIII
293
IX
327
X
361

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Page 129 - Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 'I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.
Page 114 - Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.
Page 111 - I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Prove^al minstrelsy ; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.
Page 24 - The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This element I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth and goodness and beauty 'are but different faces of the same All.
Page 461 - Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera, credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus, orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent: 850 tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.
Page 7 - TO go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.
Page 59 - I have no hostility to Nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day, like corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest.
Page 42 - ... illustrates to him. Who can estimate this? Who can guess how much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman? how much tranquillity has been reflected to man from the azure sky, over whose unspotted deeps the winds forevermore drive flocks of stormy clouds, and leave no wrinkle or stain? how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes? What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of Health!
Page 82 - The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime ; that there is One Man, — present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man.
Page 86 - He shall see . that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind.