Wherever the truth is injured, defend it. You are there on that spot within hearing of that word, within sight of that action as a Witness, to the end that you should speak for it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 4:271
The days & months & years flit by, each with his own black riband, his own sad reminiscence. Yet I looked at the almanack affectionately as a book of Promise. These three last years of my life are not a chasm—I could almost wish they were—so brilliantly sometimes the vision of Ellen’s beauty & love & life come out of the darkness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 4:263
This Book is my Savings Bank. I grow richer because I have somewhere to deposit my earnings; and fractions are worth more to me because corresponding fractions are waiting here that shall be made integers by their addition.
(Emerson wrote this as the first entry to “Journal A,” the first of a series of books that he labeled in alphabetical order starting in December, 1833. From this point on, he realized how valuable his journals would be as a place to store his ideas.)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 4:250
The subject that needs most to be presented/developed is the principle of Self reliance, what it is, what is not it, what it requires, how it teaches us to regard our friends. It is true that there is a faith wholly a man’s own, the solitary inmate of his own breast, which the faiths of all mankind cannot shake, & which they cannot confirm. But at the same time how useful, how indispensable, has been the ministry of our friends to us, our teachers,—the living and the dead.
(The words “presented” and “developed” appear as two alternatives, neither of which is struck out, so it is not clear which one Emerson wanted to use.)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 4:269
Here we are impressed with the inexhaustible riches of nature. The Universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms, — the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, insects, snakes, — & the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient, in the very rock aping organized forms. Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer, — an occult relation between the very scorpions and man. I feel the centipede in me — cayman, carp, eagle, & fox. I am moved by strange sympathies, I say continually “I will be a naturalist.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 4:199
It is very seldom that a man is truly alone. He needs to retire as much from his solitude as he does from society into very loneliness. While I am reading & writing in my chamber I am not alone though there is nobody there. There is one means of procuring solitude which to me & I apprehend to all men is effectual, & that is to go to the window & look at the stars. If they do not startle you and call you off from vulgar matters I know not what will.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 4:266
No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby—so helpless & so ridiculous.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 4:161
Our manners are sometimes so mean, our blunders & improprieties so many and mulish that it becomes a comfort to think that people are too much occupied with themselves to remember even their neighbor’s defects very long.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 4:132
