Emerson's Complete Works: Essays. 1st seriesHoughton, Mifflin, 1883 |
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Page 14
... manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him . He should see that he can live all history in his own person . He must sit solidly at home , and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires , but know that he is ...
... manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him . He should see that he can live all history in his own person . He must sit solidly at home , and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires , but know that he is ...
Page 19
... manner of persons they were and what they did . We have the same national mind expressed for us again in their literature , in epic and lyric poems , drama , and philosophy ; a very complete form . Then we have it once more in their ...
... manner of persons they were and what they did . We have the same national mind expressed for us again in their literature , in epic and lyric poems , drama , and philosophy ; a very complete form . Then we have it once more in their ...
Page 22
... manners , the same power and beauty that a gallery of sculpture or of pictures addresses . Civil and natural history , the history of art and of literature , must be explained from individual history , or must remain words . There is ...
... manners , the same power and beauty that a gallery of sculpture or of pictures addresses . Civil and natural history , the history of art and of literature , must be explained from individual history , or must remain words . There is ...
Page 25
... manner all public facts are to be indi- / vidualized , all private facts are to be generalized . Then at once History becomes fluid and true , and Biography deep and sublime . As the Persian imi- tated in the slender shafts and capitals ...
... manner all public facts are to be indi- / vidualized , all private facts are to be generalized . Then at once History becomes fluid and true , and Biography deep and sublime . As the Persian imi- tated in the slender shafts and capitals ...
Page 28
... manners of that period are plain and fierce . The reverence exhibited is for personal qualities ; courage , address , self - command , justice , strength , swiftness , a loud voice , a broad chest . Luxury and elegance are not known . A ...
... manners of that period are plain and fierce . The reverence exhibited is for personal qualities ; courage , address , self - command , justice , strength , swiftness , a loud voice , a broad chest . Luxury and elegance are not known . A ...
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action appear beautiful soul beauty become behold better black event Bonduca Cæsar character conversation divine doctrine earth effect Egypt Epaminondas ergy eternal evanescent experience fable fact fear feel friendship genius gifts give Greek hand heart heaven Heraclitus heroism hour human intel intellect less light live look man's marriage ment mind moral nature never noble object OVER-SOUL painted pass perception perfect persons Petrarch Phidias Phocion picture Pindar Plato Plotinus Plutarch poet poetry prudence relations religion Rome sculpture secret seek seems seen sense sensual sentiment Shakspeare society Socrates Sophocles soul speak Spinoza spirit stand Stoicism sweet talent teach tence thee things thou thought tion to-day to-morrow true truth ture universal virtue whilst whole wisdom wise words Xenophon youth
Popular passages
Page 52 - Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Page 52 - They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil's child, I will live then from the devil." 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 334 - Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.
Page 318 - ... the laws of its influx. Exactly parallel is the whole rule of intellectual duty to the rule of moral duty. A self-denial, no less austere than the saint's, is demanded of the scholar. He must worship truth, and forego all things for that, and choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby augmented. God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please, — you can never have both.
Page 54 - ... 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. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousandfold relief societies; — though I confess with shame I sometimes...
Page 252 - The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence.
Page 55 - 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 252 - The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest as " : the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; ithat Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's -particular being is contained and made one with all other...
Page 55 - ... they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own ; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. - x The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.
Page 47 - Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages.