For literature, one is ever struck with the fact that the good once is good always. The average strength is so fixed that among thirty jumpers the longest jump will be likely to be the longest of 300 & a very long jump will remain a very long jump a century afterward.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:63
An op-ed in the New York Times today, entitled Falser Words Were Never Spoken, raises some interesting issues about quotations. It starts by examining a quotation said to be from Henry David Thoreau:
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined.”
It goes on to, first, point out why the author of the article assumed it wasn’t by Thoreau: the author thought that Thoreau didn’t use exclamation points; he actually does, quite often, using 154 of them in Walden. He then looked up the original of the quote in Walden, finding it to be this:
“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
I’ve long been surprised by the number of “false” quotations that circulate. I regularly get e-mails from people seeking justification for quotes by Thoreau, because I run a mailing list that discusses Thoreau and his works. In most cases, the quotes don’t exist, or not in the wording my correspondents send me.
In creating this Emerson web site, my goal was to provide choice selections from Emerson’s works, but in a “scholarly” manner, citing exactly where they come from. As you can see in the journal entries that I post, I specify the volume and page; in some other entries, relative to essays or other texts, I may not specify pages, because that would require page numbers for specific editions. But I am very careful to ensure that I document the provenance of every text I post.
I get a lot of people coming to this site via Google searches for “Emerson quotation,” or something similar. Clearly people are interested in finding quotations; they are pithy examples of the man’s thinking, distilled into short, easy-to-understand bits. And I do publish some short quotations, but many of the posts here are one or more paragraphs, as a single sentence is often not enough for a serious thought.
Emerson himself famously said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.” As is the case with most quotations, this one benefits from a bit more context. What Emerson actually wrote was this:
“Immortality.
I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.”
(Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 11:110)
It’s worth noting that Emerson wrote “quotation,” or the act of quoting, not “quotations,” or the results of that action. So the quotation itself is slightly wrong, but this error seems to have occurred in the first transcription of the text, in the edition of Emerson’s journals prepared by his son, Edward, in the early 1900s.
So, be aware that the quotations you read on the Internet may not be correct. On this website, I ensure that all of the excerpts I publish can be validated by including references. My goal here is not to make a list of Emerson quotations, but simply to share the diversity of his thought, especially as seen in his journals.
Most persons exist to us merely or chiefly in relations of time & space. Those whom we love, whom we venerate, or whom we serve, exist to us independently of these relations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:61
I study the art of solitude. I yield me as gracefully as I can to my destiny. Why cannot one get the good of his doom, & since it is from eternity a settled thing that he & society shall be nothing to each other, why need he blush so, & make wry faces and labor to keep up a poor beginner’s place, a freshman’s seat in the fine world?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:58
If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterwards & you shall be a fund of new and unheard of speculations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:54
Books are not writ in the style of conversation. One might say they are not addressed to the same beings as gossip & cheat in the street. Neither are speeches, orations, sermons, academic discourses on the same key of thought or addressed to the same beings. The man that just now chatted at your side, of trifles, rises in the assembly to speak, & speaks to them collectively in a tone and with a series of thoughts he would never think of assuming to any one of them alone. Because man’s Universal nature is his inmost nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:53
When we read a book in a foreign language we suppose that an English version of it would be a transfusion of it into our own consciousness. But take Coleridge or Bacon or many an English book besides & you immediately feel that the English is a language also & that a book writ in that tongue is yet very far from you being transfused into your own consciousness. There is every degree of remoteness from the line of things in the line of words. By & by comes a word true & closely embracing the thing. That is not Latin, nor English, nor any language but thought. The aim of the author is not to tell truth—that he cannot do, but to suggest it. He has only approximated it himself & hence his cumbrous, embarrassed speech: he uses many words, hoping that one, if not another, will bring you as near to the fact as he is.
For language itself is young and unformed. In heaven it will be, as Sampson Reed said, “one with things.” Now, there are many things that refuse to be recorded,—perhaps the larger half. The unsaid part is the best of every discourse.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:51
Am I true to myself? Then nations and ages do guide my pen. Then I perceive my commission to be coeval with the oldest causes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:49
