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"Great country, diminutive minds. America is formless, has no terrible and no beautiful condensation."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. Journal entry, June 1847. Quoted in Harold Bloom, The American Religion (1992). |
"But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments to the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. "Self-Reliance," Essays, First Series (1841, repr. 1847). |
"Heaven is large, and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude. Why should we be busybodies and superserviceable?"
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. "Spiritual Laws," Essays, First Series (1841, repr. 1847). |
"A strong person makes the law and custom null before his own will."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. Speech, December 9, 1841, at the Masonic Temple, Boston, Massachusetts. "The Conservative," Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (1849). |
"Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. "The Over-Soul," Essays, First Series (1841, repr. 1847). |
"And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. poet, essayist. The Snow-Storm (l. 23-28). . .
Norton Anthology of Poetry, The. Alexander W. Allison and others, eds. (3d ed., 1983) W. W. Norton & Company. |
"And, shrilling from the solar course,
Or from fruit of chemic force,
Procession of a soul in matter,
Or the speeding change of water,
Or out of the good of evil born,
Came Uriel's voice of cherub scorn,
And a blush tinged the upper sky,
And the gods shook, they knew not why."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. poet, essayist. Uriel (l. 49-56). . .
Oxford Book of American Verse, The. F. O. Matthiessen, ed. (1950) Oxford University Press. |
"The world is the ring of his spells,
And the play of his miracles."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. "Woodnotes II," Poems (1847). |
"The subject is said to have the property of making dull men eloquent."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. "Address Delivered in Concord on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies, August 1, 1844," Miscellanies (1883, repr. 1903). |
"Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. "Behavior," The Conduct of Life (1860). |
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