Essays: First Series |
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Common terms and phrases
action affection already appear beauty becomes believe better body cause character child circle circumstance comes common conversation divine draw eternal existence experience face fact fall fear feel force friendship genius gifts give hand hear heart heaven highest hope hour human individual intellect leave less light live look lose man's manner mean meet mind moral nature never object once organs painted particular pass past perfect persons poet present prudence reason relations religion respect secret seek seems seen sense side society soul speak spirit stand sweet teach things thou thought tion true truth universal virtue whilst whole wisdom wise write young
Popular passages
Page 64 - A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
Page 52 - There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance ; that imitation is suicide ; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion ; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Page 52 - A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Page 75 - These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are ; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose ; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.
Page 128 - Some damning circumstance always transpires. The laws and substances of nature water, snow, wind, gravitation - become penalties to the thief. On the other hand, the law holds with equal sureness for all right action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.
Page 78 - Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance ? Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is.
Page 121 - As no man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him. The stag in the fable admired his horns and blamed his feet, but when the hunter came, his feet saved him, and afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns destroyed him.
Page 60 - What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.
Page 53 - Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
Page 81 - O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law.
Bibliographic information
| Title | Essays: First Series |
| Author | Ralph Waldo Emerson |
| Publisher | D. McKay, 1888 |
| Original from | Harvard University |
| Digitized | 16 Apr 2008 |
| Length | 396 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |