USA, 1803–1882
Ralph Waldo Emerson
American essayist and central voice of Transcendentalism. His essays — Self-Reliance, Nature — call the individual back to direct experience and inner authority.
Ralph Waldo Emerson in 53 lines
Every Ralph Waldo Emerson passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”
“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”
“He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.”
“I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders.”
“Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.”
“Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.”
“Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.”
“Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.”
“Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.”
“There are two classes of poets — the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.”
“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered.”
“We are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder.”
“To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.”
“When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.”
“The cup of life is not so shallow That we have drained the best That all the wine at once we swallow And lees make all the rest.”
“There is a freemasonry among the dull by which they recognize and are sociable with the dull, as surely as a correspondent tact in men of genius.”
“A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.”
“No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too.”
“Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see — not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.”
“We are always getting ready to live, but never living.”
“Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.”
“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
“I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.”
“Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the state.”
“He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.”
“The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.”
“How we hate this solemn Ego that accompanies the learned, like a double, wherever he goes.”
“People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.”
“You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.”
“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
“Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.”
“It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.”
“Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.”
“The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.”
“The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.”
“All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle.”
“The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.”
“The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.”
“You can take better care of your secret than another can.”
“Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.”
“Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.”
“We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox.”
“The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.”
“I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.”
“The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates.”
“But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.”
“Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence.”
“Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.”
“Character is higher than intellect...A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.”
“Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom.”
“Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table.”
Where Ralph Waldo Emerson lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
Someone you love is wrong in public.
You are treating relationship as a moral fact. The risk is letting love become permission.
A group accepts you only when you hide a real part of yourself.
You are trusting solitude more than counterfeit belonging. The danger is mistaking isolation for independence.
A convenient tool wants more of your attention and data.
You are protecting attention as a condition for thought. The risk is romanticizing refusal when adaptation would be wiser.
Love asks you to change in ways you did not expect.
You are refusing to make belonging depend on disappearance. The danger is mistaking vulnerability for captivity.
The expert's advice contradicts what your own eyes tell you.
You are weighting direct observation against general authority. The cost is confidence that scales badly outside your experience.
You cannot tell if you are finding yourself or inventing one.
You are trusting that there is a grain to work with. The risk is calling every impulse authentic because it was loud.
Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson today
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1803–1882, from USA — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 53 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Albert Camus — France/Algeria, 1913–1960
- Arthur Schopenhauer — Germany, 1788–1860
- Bertrand Russell — UK, 1872–1970
- Carl Jung — Switzerland, 1875–1961
- David Hume — Scotland, 1711–1776
- Friedrich Nietzsche — Germany, 1844–1900
Argues the same cases
Confucius, Socrates, Immanuel Kant, Aristotle, Lao Tzu, David Hume take positions on the same dilemmas as Ralph Waldo Emerson, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.