Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truth is beautiful. Without doubt; and so are lies. I have no fairer page in my life’s album than the delicious memory of some passages at Concord on the Merrimack when affection contrived to give a witchcraft surpassing even the deep attraction of its own truth to a parcel of accidental & insignificant circumstances. Those coach wheels that rolled into the mist & darkness of the July morning. The little piazza, a piece of silk, the almshouse, the Davison girl, & such other things, which were not the charm, have more reality to this groping memory than the charm itself which illuminated them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:8

The only true economy of time is to rely without interval on your own judgment. Keep the eye & ear open to all impressions, but deepen no impression by effort, but take the opinion of the Genius within, what ought to be retained by you & what rejected by you. Keep, that is, the upright position. Resign yourself to your thoughts, & then every object will make that mark, that modification of your character which it ought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:6

Extremes meet. Misfortunes even may be so accumulated as to be ludicrous. To be shipwrecked is bad; to be shipwrecked on an ice-berg is horrible; to be shipwrecked on an iceberg in a snowstorm, confounds us; to be shipwrecked on an iceberg in a storm and to find a bear on the snow bank to dispute the sailor’s landing which is not driven away till he has bitten off a sailor’s arm, is rueful to laughter.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 4:383

There is in every man a determination of character to a peculiar end, counteracted often by unfavorable fortune, but more apparent the more he is left at liberty. This is called his genius, or his nature, or his turn of mind. The object of Education should be to remove all obstructions & let this natural force have free play & exhibit its peculiar product. It seems to be true that no man in this is deluded. This determination of his character is to something in his nature; something real. This object is called his Idea. It is that which rules his most advised actions, those especially that are most his, & is most distinctly discerned by him in those days or moments when he derives the sincerest satisfaction from his life. It can only be indicated by any action not defined by anything less than the aggregate of all his genuine actions; perhaps then only approximated.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 4:378

It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centred. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 4:367

Loathsome lecture last eve. on precocity, & the dissection of the brain, & the distortion of the body, & genius, &c. A grim compost of blood & mud. Blessed, thought I, were those who, lost in their pursuits, never knew that they had a body or a mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 4:362

Today, riding to East Sudbury, I pleased myself with the beauties & terrors of the snow; the oak leaf hurrying over the banks is fit ornament. Nature in the woods is very companionable. There, my Reason & my Understanding are sufficient company for each other. I have my glees as well as my glooms alone. Confirm my faith (& when I write the word, Faith looks indignant), pledge me the word of the Highest that I shall have my dead & my absent again, and I could be content & cheerful alone for a thousand years. I know no aisle so stately as the roads through the pine woods in Maine. Cold is the snowdrift topping itself with sand. How intense are our affinities: acids & alkalis. The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; all its tragedies & ennuis vanish, all duties even, nothing remains to fill eternity with but two or three persons. But then a person is a cause. What is Luther but Protestantism? or Columbus but Columbia? And were I assured of meeting Ellen tomorrow, would it be less than a world, a personal world? Death has no bitterness in the light of that thought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 4:359

There is great delight in learning a new language. When the day comes in the scholar’s progress unawares when he reads pages without recurrence to his dictionary, he shuts up his book with that sort of fearful delight with which the bridegroom sits down in his own house with the bride, saying, ‘I shall now live with you always.’

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 4:358