That life alone is beautiful which is conformed to an Idea
That life alone is beautiful which is conformed to an Idea. Let us not live from hand to mouth now that we may not ever.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:126
Archive for September, 2011
But how few men can see the sky & the woods!
C. thinks if a superior being should look into families, he would find natural relations existing, & man a worthy being, but if he followed them into shops, senates, churches, & societies, they would appear wholly artificial & worthless. Society seems noxious. I believe that against these baleful influences Nature is the antidote. The man comes out of the wrangling of the shop & office, & sees the sky & the woods, & is a man again. He not only quits the cabal but he finds himself. But how few men can see the sky & the woods!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:125
…matter flows out from spirit, & does not find its cause in itself
For the education of the Understanding the Earth & worlds serve. It takes the first steps by geology, astronomy, zoology, to learn that natures dice are always loaded; that in the most promiscuous heaps & rubbish, an informed eye can find harmonious, inevitable, & beneficial results, and these are premises to the later conclusion that matter flows out from spirit, & does not find its cause in itself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:124
The philosopher, the priest, hesitates to receive money for his instructions,—the author for his works
The philosopher, the priest, hesitates to receive money for his instructions,—the author for his works. Instead of this scruple let them make filthy lucre beautiful by its just expenditure.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:120
Creation is . . . a perpetual festival to the wise man
It seems to me that the Creation is, according to the sentiment of Diogenes, a perpetual festival to the wise man. That to the lover of nature is immortal youth and I see not when I am in the woods how I should grow weary in a thousand years.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:119
We build the sepulchers of our fathers
Set men upon thinking & you have been to them a God. All history is poetry; the globe of facts whereon they trample is bullion to the scientific eye. Meanest life a thread of empyrean light. Scholar converts for them the dishonored facts which they know, into trees of life; their daily routine into a garden of God by suggesting the principle which classifies the facts. We build the sepulchers of our fathers: can we never behold the Universe as new and feel that we have a stake as much as our predecessors?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:117
A man is a method; a progressive arrangement; a selecting principal gathering his like to him wherever he goes
A man is a method; a progressive arrangement; a selecting principal gathering his like to him wherever he goes. “Half is more than the whole.” Yes let the man of taste be the selector & Half is a good deal better than the whole or any infinitesimal part becomes a just representative of the Infinite. A man of taste sent into Italy shall give me a few objects that shall give me more lively & permanent pleasure than galleries, cities, & mountain chains. A man is a choice.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:114
Mr Meriam owns this field, Mr Bacon that, & Mr Butterfield the next, but the poet owns the whole
Mr Meriam owns this field, Mr Bacon that, & Mr Butterfield the next, but the poet owns the whole. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts. And the best part of all these men’s farms, the face which they show to the poet’s eye, they do not possess but he. The view of the field & wood at the distance of a quarter of a mile has no property in.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:113
