The great order & revolution of events…
The great order & revolution of events is somewhat too huge & unwieldy to be fashioned to our caprice; we must accommodate our wills to it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 2:285
Archive for March, 2011
The best thing one can do in this world…
The best thing one can do in this world is to sidle quietly along without any inflexible philosophy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 2:283
Why has my motley diary no jokes?
Why has my motley diary no jokes? Because it is a soliloquy & every man is grave alone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 2:268
The whole action & result of Society seems to be a perpetual Comparison
The whole action & result of Society seems to be a perpetual Comparison. Man is compared with man & minus or plus written on his forehead. One is immediately carried one way & his companion another to be measured again with new mates. Each individual is anxious to have his standard merit fixed & known, jealous of his neighbours and eager to know the success of every other. Those that are highly ranked are elated, & soon tire of the elevation when there remains no reward to ambition & grow impatient to go away into new communities to find rivals worthy of themselves. Those to whom the decision is unfavourable repine in silence, or resent the decision by calumniating their superiours. Some are overtaken by a melancholy spirit which makes them unprofitable or sometimes worse. Others spit their venom at every good thing, or fall below a dependence on Opinion by becoming enemies of mankind & make themselves feared as a sort of atonement to their selflove for not making themselves respected.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 2:253
The cases are so few in which we can see connexion & order in events…
The cases are so few in which we can see connexion & order in events by reason of the narrow field of our Vision that we are glad in our vanity if we can solder with our imaginations into a system, things in fact unconnected, can turn the ravishment of devotion or poetry into prophecies by searching up & down in the great garner of history for an event that will chime with a prediction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 2:251
