Ralph Waldo Emerson: Man (page 4)

“When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field the next man will appear.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Uses of Great Men
1850s, Representative Men (1850)

People , Nature , Appearance

“Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the state.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Journal, 328, Nov. 15, 1839, http://www.perfectidius.com/Volume_5_1838-1841.pdf
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

“There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), History

Men , Feeling , Understanding , Thinking

“For what are they all in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good Bye
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: For what are they all in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?

God

“Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)

Thinking

“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.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)

Suffering

“Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Introduction
1830s, Nature http://www.emersoncentral.com/nature.htm (1836)

Life , Truth , Question , Perfection

“A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Power and Laws of Thought (c. 1870)

“Though love repine, and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply, —
"'Tis man's perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die."”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sacrifice
1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)
Variant: Though love repine, and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply, —
"'Tis man's perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die."

Love , Truth

“We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson Worship

Worship
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)

Tree

“One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Circles

Wisdom , Justice , Beauty

“There are two laws discrete
Not reconciled,
Law for man, and law for thing.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ode Inscribed to W.H. Channing http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/ode_inscribed_to_william_h_channing.htm, st. 9
1840s, Poems (1847)

Law

“But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)

Men , Hope

“Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Quotation and Originality

“Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of the perfect compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give and Take, the doctrine that every thing has its price, — and if that price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and that it is impossible to get any thing without its price, — is not less sublime in the columns of a leger than in the budgets of states, in the laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature. I cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees implicated in those processes with which he is conversant, the stern ethics which sparkle on his chisel-edge, which are measured out by his plumb and foot-rule, which stand as manifest in the footing of the shop-bill as in the history of a state, — do recommend to him his trade, and though seldom named, exalt his business to his imagination.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Compensation

Law , Imagination , History , Business

“Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the fruit of his character.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fate
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)

Nature

“Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Fugitive Slave Law http://www.rwe.org/comm/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=75&Itemid=254, a lecture in New York City (7 March 1854), The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1904)

God , Perfection

“Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wood-notes
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Home

“If a man own land, the land owns him.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wealth
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)