Ralph Waldo EmersonРальф Уолдо Эмерсон

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.

We owe to books those general benefits which come from high intellectual action.

… 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 lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.

We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see,—painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them and are willing to let the words go; for at any time they can use words as good when occasion comes.

Of course each poor soul loses all his old stays; …

Is not this wrong? is not this dangerous? ’Tis not wrong, but the law of growth. It is not dangerous, any more than the mother’s withdrawing her hands from the tottering babe, at his first walk across the nursery-floor: the child fears and cries, but achieves the feat, instantly tries it again, and never wishes to be assisted more. And this infant soul must learn to walk alone. At first he is forlorn, homeless; but this rude stripping him of all support drives him inward, and he finds himself unhurt; he finds himself face to face with the majestic Presence, reads the original of the Ten Commandments, the original of Gospels and Epistles; nay, his narrow chapel expands to the blue cathedral of the sky, …

To nations or to individuals the progress of opinion is not a loss of moral restraint, but simply a change from coarser to finer checks.

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul.

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. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, ‘I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.’

… and said, in the next age, ‘This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.’ The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before.

He felt respect for Moses and the prophets; but no unfit tenderness at postponing their initial revelations, to the hour and the man that now is; to the eternal revelation in the heart. Thus was he a true man. Having seen that the law in us is commanding, he would not suffer it to be commanded. Boldly, with hand, and heart, and life, he declared it was God.

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.

What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend.

A wise old proverb says, “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.

27. Whilst another man has no land, my title to mine, your title to yours, is at once vitiated.

Of course, whilst another man has no land, my title to mine, your title to yours, is at once vitiated.

The mind is one, and the best minds, who love truth for its own sake, think much less of property in truth. They accept it thankfully everywhere, and do not label or stamp it with any man’s name, for it is theirs long beforehand, and from eternity.

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. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

You shall not wish for death out of pusillanimity. The weight of the Universe is pressed down on the shoulders of each moral agent to hold him to his task. The only path of escape known in all the worlds of God is performance. You must do your work, before you shall be released.

Honor him whose life is perpetual victory; him, who, by sympathy with the invisible and real, finds support in labor, instead of praise; who does not shine, and would rather not.

With eyes open, he makes the choice of virtue, which outrages the virtuous; of religion, which churches stop their discords to burn and exterminate; for the highest virtue is always against the law.

The unremitting retention of simple and high sentiments in obscure duties is hardening the character to that temper which will work with honor, if need be in the tumult, or on the scaffold.

I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction, namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall continue, it will continue; if not best, then it will not: and we, if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen. Whatever it be which the great Providence prepares for us, it must be something large and generous, and in the great style of his works. The future must be up to the style of our faculties,--of memory, of hope, of imagination, of reason.

Всё, чтò я видел и знаю, учит меня верить тому, чего я не видел и не знаю.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage.

A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.

For every thing that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; …

Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; …

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!

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.

We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know that it is divine.

I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which house to-day in this mortal frame, shall ever re-assemble in equal activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a natural history like that of this body you see before you; but this one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist, cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that they circulate through the Universe: before the world was, they were.

I draw from this faith courage and hope.

All things are known to the soul. It is not to be surprised by any communication. Nothing can be greater than it. Let those fear and those fawn who will. The soul is in her native realm, and it is wider than space, older than time, wide as hope, rich as love.

He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.

Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.

Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property.

They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.

But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature.

По недостатку доверия к себе люди с величайшим старанием поддерживают установившиеся порядки; они до того погрязли в материальных интересах, что на проявления души человеческой, выражающиеся в отношениях к людям, смотрят только с точки зрения улучшения своего имущественного положения.

All your aggregate existences are less to me a fact than is my own; as I am born to the earth, so the Earth is given to me, what I want of it to till and to plant; nor could I, without pusillanimity, omit to claim so much.

Так как я рожден для земли, то земля и дана мне для того, чтобы брать из нее, что мне нужно, для обработки и посадки, и я имею право требовать себе свою долю.

Покажите же мне, где она?

The joy of the spirit indicates its strength.

The joy of the spirit indicates its strength.

The belief that one may, by believing in something, be saved from the consequences of his wrong-doing, is a curse to humanity, and the cause - of most of the evils that now afflict the world.

… in a thought which revises our entire manner of lite, and says: "Thus hast thou done, but it were better thus ". And all our after-years like menials serve and wait on this and execute its will.

But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the way-side as we walk; …

… in a thought which revises our entire manner of life and says,—‘Thus hast thou done, but it were better thus.’

And all our after years, like menials, serve and wait on this, and according to their ability execute its will.

Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives ; all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.

But this is the way we rise. Within every man's thought is a higher thought,--within the character he exhibits to-day, a higher character.

The youth puts off the illusions of the child, the man puts off the ignorance and tumultuous passions of youth; proceeding thence puts off the egotism of manhood, and becomes at last a public and universal soul.

He is rising to greater heights, but also rising to realities; the outer relations and circumstances dying out, he entering deeper into God, God into him, until the last garment of egotism falls, and he is with God,--shares the will and the immensity of the First Cause.

A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is instructed in what is above him.

He learns that his being is without bound; that, to the good, to the perfect, he is born, low as he now lies in evil and weakness.

That which he venerates is still his own, though he has not realized it yet. _He ought._ He knows the sense of that grand word, though his analysis fails to render account of it.

I conceive a man as always spoken to from behind, and unable to turn his head and see the speaker. In all the millions who have heard the voice, none ever saw the face.

That well-known voice speaks in all languages, governs all men, and none ever caught a glimpse of its form. If the man will exactly obey it, it will adopt him, so that he shall not any longer separate it from himself in his thought, he shall seem to be it, he shall be it.

If he listen with insatiable ears, richer and greater wisdom is taught him, the sound swells to a ravishing music, he is borne away as with a flood, he becomes careless of his food and of his house, he is the fool of ideas, and leads a heavenly life.

But if his eye is set on the things to be done, and not on the truth that is still taught, and for the sake of which the things are to be done, then the voice grows faint, and at last is but a humming in his ears.

If there is any great and good thing in store for you, it will not come at the first or the second call, nor in the shape of fashion, ease, and city drawing-rooms.

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.

But that which a man is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes.

Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers.

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please,—you can never have both.

Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates.

He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets,—most likely his father’s.

He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.

The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end.

Morals is the direction of the will on universal ends. He is immoral who is acting to any private end.

He is moral,--we say it with Marcus Aurelius and with Kant,--whose aim or motive may become a universal rule, binding on all intelligent beings; …

We affirm that in all men is this majestic perception and command; that it is the presence of the Eternal in each perishing man; …

Нравственен тот, — мы говорим это с Марком Аврелием и Кантом, — чья цель или побудительная причина может быть поставлена целью всех живых существ.

As thou sowest, thou shalt reap.

Smite, and thou shalt smart.

Serve, and thou shalt be served.

If you love and serve men, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape the remuneration.

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.

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

What a man does, that he has.

What has he to do with hope or fear?

In himself is his might.

Let him regard no good as solid but that which is in his nature and which must grow out of him as long as he exists.

Yet I will suggest that no separation from labor can be without some loss of power and of truth to the seer himself; that, I doubt not, the faults and vices of our literature and philosophy, their too great fineness, effeminacy, and melancholy, are attributable to the enervated and sickly habits of the literary class.

Better that the book should not be quite so good, and the bookmaker abler and better, and not himself often a ludicrous contrast to all that he has written.

Отделение себя от ручного труда не может быть без потери умственной силы, способности понимать истину.

Manual labor is the study of the external world. The advantage of riches remains with him who procured them, not with the heir.

When I go into my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhileration and health, that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.

But not only health, but education is in the work.

… but now I feel some shame before my wood-chopper, my ploughman, and my cook, for they have some sort of self-sufficiency, they can contrive without my aid to bring the day and year round, but I depend on them, and have not earned by use a right to my arms and feet.

Ручная работа есть изучение внешнего мира.

Выгоды богатства остаются у того, кто производит богатство, а не у того, кто его получает даром.

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.

It is a deliverance which does not deliver.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them one’s self, so as to have somewhat left to give, instead of being always prompt to grab?

It is more elegant to answer one’s own needs, than to be richly served; inelegant perhaps it may look to-day, and to a few, but it is an elegance forever and to all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What is a man born for but to be a Reformer, a Re-maker of what man has made; a renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great Nature which embosoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, and with every pulsation a new life?

It is our practical perception of the Deity in man. It has its deep foundations in religion.

Extremes meet, and there is no better example than the haughtiness of humility.

No aristocrat, no prince born to the purple, can begin to compare with the self-respect of the saint.

Why is he so lowly, but that he knows that he can well afford it, resting on the largeness of God in him?

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper in the world which exists for him.

I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.

If I am born in the earth, where is my part? have the goodness, gentlemen of this world, to show me my wood-lot, where I may fell my wood, my field where to plant my corn, my pleasant ground where to build my cabin.

'Touch any wood, or field, or house-lot, on your peril,' cry all the gentlemen of this world; 'but you may come and work in ours, for us, and we will give you a piece of bread.'

Why needs any man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses and places of amusement? Only for want of thought.

Give his mind a new image, and he flees into a solitary garden or garret to enjoy it, and is richer with that dream, than the fee of a county could make him.

One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

Sufficient to to-day are the duties of to-day. Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it.

Future state is an illusion for the ever-present state. It is not length of life, but depth of life. It is not duration, but a taking of the soul out of time, as all high action of the mind does: when we are living in the sentiments we ask no questions about time.

Jesus explained nothing, but the influence of him took people out of time, and they felt eternal.

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men.

The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals.

If theology shows that opinions are fast changing, it is not so with the convictions of men with regard to conduct. These remain.

If we measure our individual forces against hers we may easily feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable destiny. But if, instead of identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul of the workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and chemistry, and, over them, of life, preexisting within us in their highest form.

Love would put a new face on this weary old world in which we dwell as pagans and enemies too long, and it would warm the heart to see how fast the vain diplomacy of statesmen, the impotence of armies, and navies, and lines of defence, would be superseded by this unarmed child.

The virtue of this principle in human society in application to great interests is obsolete and forgotten. Once or twice in history it has been tried in illustrious instances, with signal success.

But one day all men will be lovers; and every calamity will be dissolved in the universal sunshine.