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. Speak your latent conviction, and it
shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the
outmost,--and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets
of the Last Judgment. Self-Reliance
The faith should blend with the light
of rising and of setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing
bird, and the breath of flowers. Harvard Divinity Address
Every man is not so
much a workman in the world, as he is a suggestion of that he should
be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.
Circles
It is the
delight of vulgar talent to dazzle and to blind the beholder. But true
genius seeks to defend us from itself. True genius will not
impoverish, but will liberate, and add new senses. If a wise man
should appear in our village he would create, in those who conversed
with him, a new consciousness of wealth, by opening their eyes to
unobserved advantages; he would establish a sense of immovable
equality, calm us with assurances that we could not be cheated; as
every one would discern the checks and guaranties of condition. The
rich would see their mistakes and poverty, the poor their escapes
and their resources.
Representative Men - Uses of Great Men
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes
across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of
bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it
is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts:
they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Self-Reliance
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the
worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means
go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better
never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my
own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The American Scholar
Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you
always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of
virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes
of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The
consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. Self-Reliance
Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The world is upheld by
the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who
lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and
tolerable only in our belief in such society; and, actually or
ideally, we manage to live with superiors. We call our children and
our lands by their names. Their names are wrought into the verbs of
language, their works and effigies are in our houses, and every
circumstance of the day recalls an anecdote of them.
Representative Men - Uses of Great Men
Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it. The length of the discourse
indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer.
If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would
be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be
suffered.
Circles
The wise man shows his wisdom in
separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is
as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but
suppose every man is as every other man. What is not good they call
the worst, and what is not hateful, they call the best. Nature (1836)
Character
is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the
functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will
be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or
medium to impart his truths? He can still fall back on this
elemental force of living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a
partial act.
The American Scholar
If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy
for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we
have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded
treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as
sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn. Self-Reliance
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw
with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony,
ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there.
Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man.
Harvard Divinity Address
The worst day is good for something. All that is not love, is knowledge, and all that is not good today, is a store laid up for the wants of distant days.
Journal (Sept.-Oct. 1845)
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every
moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the
adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half
possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.
Self-Reliance
It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself. Compensation
"Every
scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it
forth," -- is the fundamental law of criticism. A life in harmony
with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to
understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive
sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be
to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and
final cause.
Nature (1836)
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. Self-Reliance
This old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In
nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and
forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life,
transition, the energizing spirit.
Circles
It has been said, that "common souls pay with what they do;
nobler souls with that which they are." And why? Because a profound
nature awakens in us by its actions and words, by its very looks and
manners, the same power and beauty that a gallery of sculpture, or of
pictures, addresses.
History
The sensual man
conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his
thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other, as
fluid, and impresses his being thereon. To him, the refractory world
is ductile and flexible; he invests dust and stones with humanity,
and makes them the words of the Reason. Nature (1836)
For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.
And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The
by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the
friend's parlour. If this aversation had its origin in contempt and
resistance like his own, he might well go home with a sad
countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet
faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows
and a newspaper directs.
Self-Reliance
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons
do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing.
The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye
and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward
and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has
retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His
intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. Nature (1836)
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. Circles
From within or from behind, a light shines
through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but
the light is all. The Over-soul
The imitator dooms
himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was
natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator,
something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty,
to come short of another man's.
Harvard Divinity Address
He is a great average man; one who, to the best thinking, adds a
proportion and equality in his faculties, so that men see in him their
own dreams and glimpses made available and made to pass for what
they are. A great common-sense is his warrant and qualification to
be the world's interpreter. He has reason, as all the philosophic
and poetic class have: but he has also what they have not,- this
strong solving sense to reconcile his poetry with the appearances of
the world, and build a bridge from the streets of cities to the
Atlantis. Representative Men - Plato; or the Philosopher
In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its
institution are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were
born: that they are not superior to the citizen: that every one of
them was once the act of a single man: every law and usage was a
man's expedient to meet a particular case: that they all are
imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.
Politics
Hitch your wagon to a star. Civilization
The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the
bard, sits on his neck and writes through his hand; so that when he
seems to vent a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact
allegory. Hence Plato said that "poets utter great and wise things
which they do not themselves understand."
History
It
is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that
He speaketh, not spake. Harvard Divinity Address
Speak the
truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots
of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you
witness. Harvard Divinity Address
Writing should be the settlement of dew on the leaf, of stalactites on the wall of the grotto, the deposite of flesh from the blood, of woody fibre in the tree from the sap.
Journal (Jan.-March. 1845)
I have no expectation that any
man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a
remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper
sense than what he is doing to-day.
History
(...) Hence, the less government we have, the better, -- the fewer
laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of
formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth
of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the
prxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing
government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation. That which
all things tend to educe, which freedom, cultivation, intercourse,
revolutions, go to form and deliver, is character; that is the end of
nature, to reach unto this coronation of her king. To educate the
wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man,
the State expires. The appearance of character makes the State
unnecessary. Politics
In private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism
seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its
candle. Nature stretcheth out her arms to embrace man, only let his
thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps
with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur and
grace to the decoration of her darling child. Only let his thoughts
be of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture. Nature (1836)
The true
preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his
life, -- life passed through the fire of thought. Harvard Divinity Address
The great, or such as
hold of nature, and transcend fashions by their fidelity to universal
ideas, are saviors from these federal errors, and defend us from
our contemporaries. They are the exceptions which we want, where all
grows alike. A foreign greatness is the antidote for cabalism.
Representative Men - Uses of Great Men
Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he that thinks
most, will say least. We can foresee God in the coarse, and, as it
were, distant phenomena of matter; but when we try to define and
describe himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are as
helpless as fools and savages. That essence refuses to be recorded
in propositions, but when man has worshipped him intellectually, the
noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It
is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the
individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it.
Nature (1836)
Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. Compensation
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is
composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the
ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation
to-day, next year die, and their experience with them. Self-Reliance
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. Great men have always done so,
and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying
their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their
heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. Self-Reliance
Deal so
plainly with man and woman, as to constrain the utmost sincerity, and
destroy all hope of trifling with you. It is the highest compliment
you can pay.
The Over-soul
A political victory, a
rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent
friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think
good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you
peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of
principles.
Self-Reliance
Hitch your wagon to a star. Civilization
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. Art
In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed. Prudence
Ah me!
no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet,
avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret;
they love to be blind in public. They think society wiser than their
soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the
whole world.
Harvard Divinity Address
