A new day, a new harvest, new duties, new men, new fields of thought, new powers call you, and an eye fastened on the past unsuns nature, bereaves me of hope, and ruins me with a squalid indigence with nothing but death can adequately symbolize.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 8:229
A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water or potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man’s crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 8:249
From Emerson’s essay Nature, published in 1836. Page references are to the Library of America volume of Essays and Lectures.
We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough. (LoA 15)
We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it. (LoA 16)
Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. (LoA 18)
Nothing is quite beautiful alone; nothing but is beautiful in the whole. (LoA 18)
Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture. (LoA 20)
Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? (LoA 21)
The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ant’s; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime. (LoA 22)
A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. (LoA 22)
How calmly and genially the mind apprehends one after another the laws of physics! What noble emotions dilate the mortal as he enters into the counsels of the creation, and feels by knowledge the privilege to BE! His insight refines him. The beauty of nature shines in his own breast. Man is greater that he can see this, and the universe less, because Time and Space relations vanish as laws are known. (LoA 27)
The moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him. (LoA 29)
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As the wandering sea-bird which, crossing the ocean, alights on some rock or islet to rest for a moment its wings, and to look back on the wilderness of waves behind and forward to the wilderness of waters before, so stand we perched on this rock or shoal of time, arrived out of the immensity of the Past and roadready to plunge in immensity again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Introductory lecture to Emerson’s The Present Age lecture series, given on December 4, 1839, at the Masonic Temple, Boston. The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 3:200.
Emerson gave a revised version of this lecture under the name The Spirit of the Times on February 15, 1848, at the same location. The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1:124.
