Essays, First Series

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Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1876 - 290 pages

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Page 48 - I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me.
Page 96 - Even so doth God protect us if we be Virtuous and wise. Winds blow, and waters roll, Strength to the brave, and power, and deity, Yet in themselves are nothing...
Page 43 - 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 46 - 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 102 - Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends, and home, and laws, and faith, as the shellfish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new house.
Page 231 - Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God : yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable.
Page 55 - Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man ; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony ; the Reformation, of Luther ; Quakerism, of Fox ; Methodism, of Wesley ; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called " the height of Rome " ; and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.
Page 50 - If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.
Page 216 - God comes to see us without bell:" that is, as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to all the attributes of God.
Page 11 - THERE is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought he may think; what a saint has felt he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand.

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