Select Essays and Addresses, Including The American ScholarMacmillan Company, 1922 - 275 pages |
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Select Essays and Addresses: Including the American Scholar Ralph Waldo Emerson No preview available - 2015 |
Common terms and phrases
action American appears beauty better Cæsar called century character Chaucer church compensation conversation Cyclopean architecture Delphic Sibyl divine drama Emerson English Epaminondas essay fact fashion fear feel flower force friendship genius gentleman gift give Goethe Greek heart heaven hero heroic heroism honor human Iliad intellectual John Julius Cæsar king labor literary live look manners means mind moral Napoleon nation nature never noble party perfect persons Phidias philosopher Phocion Plato Plutarch Poems poet poetry political Polycrates Provençal RALPH WALDO EMERSON relation religion rich Roman scholar seems sense Shakspeare Sir Launfal Sir Philip Sidney society Sophocles soul speak spirit stand statesman sweet talent Thebes things Thomas Carlyle thou thought tion true truth virtue whilst whole wise word write Zoroaster
Popular passages
Page 65 - To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.
Page 69 - 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.
Page 206 - God, find the earth below not in unison with these, but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides.
Page 207 - We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.
Page 66 - 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 73 - 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. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — " Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.
Page 185 - Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.
Page 68 - Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
Page 66 - 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 69 - Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.