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action affection animal appears beauty become believe better body called cause comes common conversation delight direct doubt earth equal exist experience expression eyes fact faith force genius give Goethe ground hand head heart heaven higher human ideas individual intellectual Italy keep kind king knew learned less light live look manners master material means merit mind moral Napoleon nature never object once opinion organ original party pass persons philosopher plant Plato play poet poetry practical present reason relation remains representative secret seems sense sentiment Shakspeare showed side society soul speak spirit stand Swedenborg talent things thought tion true truth turn universal virtue whole wise wish write
Popular passages
Page 12 - I count him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty ; he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light and in large relations, whilst they must make painful corrections and keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error.
Page 12 - He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.
Page 86 - The loyalty, well held to fools, does make Our faith mere folly: — Yet he that can endure To follow with allegiance a fallen lord, Does conquer him that did his master conquer, And earns a place i
Page 49 - Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world.
Page 226 - ... for creation. We are always in peril, always in a bad plight, just on the edge of destruction and only to be saved by invention and courage. This vigor was guarded and tempered by the coldest prudence and punctuality. A thunderbolt in the attack, he was found invulnerable in his intrenchments. His very attack was never the inspiration of courage, but the result of calculation. His idea of the best defence consists in being still the attacking party. " My ambition," he says, " was great, but was...
Page 189 - 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.
Page 197 - What may this mean, That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel, Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous; and we fools of nature So horridly to shake our disposition With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Page 160 - The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining soliloquy on every random topic that comes into his head ; treating everything without ceremony, yet with masculine sense. There have been men with deeper insight ; but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of thoughts : he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that he cares for.
Page 156 - Essays. I heard with pleasure that one of the newly-discovered autographs of William Shakespeare was in a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne. It is the only book which we certainly know to have been in the poet's library.
Page 152 - Let us have a robust, manly life ; let us know what we know, for certain ; what we have, let it be solid and seasonable and our own. A world in the hand is worth two in the bush. Let us have to do with real men and women, and not with skipping ghosts.
Bibliographic information
| Title | Complete Works Complete Works, Ralph Waldo Emerson |
| Author | Ralph Waldo Emerson |
| Publisher | Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1899 |
| Original from | Harvard University |
| Digitized | 27 Mar 2008 |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |