How little of the man see we in his person. The man Minot who busies himself all the year round under my windows writes out his nature in a hundred works, in drawing water, hewing wood, building fence, feeding his cows, haymaking & a few times in the year he goes into the woods. Thus his human spirit unites itself with nature. Why need I ever hear him speak articulate words?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:296
Old & New put their stamp to everything in Nature. The snowflake that is now falling is marked by both. The present moment gives the motion & the color of the flake: Antiquity, its form & properties. All things wear a lustre which is the gift of the present & a tarnish of time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:286
In these Lectures which from week to week I read, each on a topic which is a main interest of man, & maybe made an object of exclusive interest I seem to vie with the brag of Puck “I can put a girdle round about the world in forty minutes.” I take fifty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:286
There is one memory of waking, & another of sleep. Certainly in my dreams the same scenes or fancies are associated & a whole crew of borders at some dream house of which gentlemen & ladies I can trace no shadow of remembrance in any waking experience of mine. In sleep, I also travel certain roads in certain stage coaches, & walk alone in meadows whose archetype I wot not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:285
One has patience with every kind of living thing but not with the dead alive. I, at least, hate to see persons of that lumpish class who are here they know not why, & ask not whereto, but live as the larva of the ant or the bee to be lugged into the sun & lugged back into the cell & then fed. The end of nature for such, is that they should be fatted. If mankind should pass a vote on the subject, I think it would throw them in sacks into the sea.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:284
Being a lover of solitude I went to live in the country seventeen miles from Boston, & there the northwest wind with all his snows took me in charge & defended me from all company in winter, & the hills & sand-banks that intervened between me & the city, kept guard in summer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:283
The Universal mind is so far from being measured in any finite numbers, that its verdict would be vitiated at once by any reference to numbers, however large. “The multitude is the worst argument,” and, in fact, the only way of arriving at this Universal mind, is to quit the whole world, & take counsel of the bosom alone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:282
A poor woman having covered her children in the winter nights with all the rags & bits of cloth and carpet she could find, was accustomed to lay down over all an old door which had come off its hinges. “Ah, dear mother,” said her eldest daughter, “how I pity the poor children that haven’t got any door to cover them.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:282
