Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have once or twice been apprehensive that I was reading in vain, that the cultivation of my mind did not turn to any good account in my intercourse with men. I am now satisfied of the contrary. I have every inch of my merits. More is conceded to me than I have a just title to. I am oftener compelled to deplore my ignorance than to be pleased with my knowledge. I have no knowledge that I do not want.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 3:100

My days are made up of the irregular succession of a very few different tones of feeling. These are my feasts & fasts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 3:99

A few days hence an unforeseen exposure to a storm or to cold, will shut you up in your chamber, will heat your blood to fever and stretch you on your bed. A few days more and idle eyes will run over your obituary in the newspaper. The selfish world will soon forget you. The sun will shine on your funeral as bright as he did at your bridal day & for one word that is spoken of your character ten twenty will be spoken of the settlement of your estate. When two or three weeks of decent grief are gone those of your own household will quote the day of your death as a convenient date, & not an occasion of grief; so rapidly in men’s hearts are the strongest passages of the past, swallowed up in interests & din of the present. But when you are thus numbered with those who have no part in all that is done under the sun, when in the places where your foot was familiar it is no more known and all trace of you is obliterated as tho’ it had never been, shall you also forget as you are forgotten; shall your memory, my brother, be swept with the same waters of oblivion? If not, where will consciousness awake again? In what society, in what presence will you stand?

The employment of time is the main purpose of life & the main consequence of death is the account that is to be rendered thereof.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 3:97

There is a story of a man who on his deathbed called to him his profligate son & left him large possessions, only exacting of him the promise to spend an hour every day alone. The son kept his word & became a wise & good man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 3:96

Vast deal of time spent in thinking of what we have done & in fruitless imaginations concerning what we are to do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 3:83

In the view of Compensations nothing is given. There is always a price. Purity is the price at which impurity may be sold. If I sell my cruelty I shall become merciful of necessity. No man ever had pride but he suffered from it or parted with it for meekness without feeling the advantage of the blessed change.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 3:79

Let the glory of the world go where it will, the mind has its own glory. What it doth, endures. No man can serve many masters. And often the choice is not given you between greatness in the world & greatness of soul, which you will choose, but both advantages are not compatible. The night is fine; the stars shed down their severe influences upon me, and I feel a joy in my solitude that the merriment of vulgar society can never communicate. There is a pleasure in the thought that the particular tone of my mind at this moment may be new in the universe; that the emotions of this hour may be peculiar & unexampled in the whole eternity of moral being. I lead a new life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 3:78

The works of art & the works of nature are all monuments on which some record is inscribed of departed strength & faded glory. It is enough. There is none here who has not felt how frail & unsubstantial was the pageant in which he stood, nay more, who has not felt how slight was his own hold on human life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 3:77