Nature: Addresses, and Lectures

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Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1883 - 315 pages
 

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Page 17 - Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball ; I am nothing ; I see all ; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me ; I am part or particle of God.
Page 34 - The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass. "The visible world and the relation of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible.
Page 73 - In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
Page 108 - 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.
Page 15 - 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 11 - Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe ? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight, and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of...
Page 95 - ... soul. He pierced the emblematic or spiritual character of the visible, audible, tangible world. Especially did his shade-loving muse hover over and interpret the lower parts of nature ; he showed the mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul material forms, and has given in epical parables a theory of insanity, of beasts, of unclean and fearful things.
Page 93 - I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic ; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Proven9al minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.
Page 61 - More servants wait on man Than he'll take notice of : in every path He treads down that which doth befriend him When sickness makes him pale and wan. O mighty love ! Man is one world, and hath Another to attend him.
Page 58 - As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws at his need inexhaustible power. Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man? Once inhale the upper air, being admitted to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite. This view, which admonishes me where the sources of wisdom and power lie, and points to virtue as to The...

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