“Le symptôme invariable de la science humaine est de voir du miraculeux dans les choses vulgaires.”
Essai sur la nature ('), 1836
Ralph Waldo Emerson, né le 25 mai 1803 à Boston et mort le 27 avril 1882 à Concord , est un essayiste, philosophe et poète américain, chef de file du mouvement transcendantaliste américain du début du XIXe siècle. Wikipedia
“Le symptôme invariable de la science humaine est de voir du miraculeux dans les choses vulgaires.”
Essai sur la nature ('), 1836
“Qu’est-ce qu’une herbe? Une plante dont les vertus n’ont pas encore été découvertes […].”
La Destinée de la République (Fortune of the Republic), 1878
Solitude et Société ('), 1870
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), History
“Hast thou named all the birds without a gun;
Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk.”
Forbearance http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/forebearance.htm
1840s, Poems (1847)
Epigraph to Friendship
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Essays, First Series
Variante: A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs;
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.
The Natural History of Intellect (1893) http://www.rwe.org/natural-history-of-intellect.html
“And every man, in love or pride,
Of his fate is ever wide.”
Nemesis
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.”
Poetry and Imagination
1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Books, Letters and Social Aims http://www.rwe.org/comm/index.php?option=com_content&task=category§ionid=5&id=74&Itemid=149 (1876)
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
“The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it.”
Friendship
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Essays, First Series
“God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.”
Society and Solitude
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him.”
Said to a young Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had written a piece critical of Plato in response to his earlier conversation with Emerson, as reported by Felix Frankfurter in Harlan Buddington Phillips, Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (1960), p. 59
Heroism
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841)
“In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.”
Letters and Social Aims, Quotation and Originality
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Friendship
Considerations by the Way
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)
Blight http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/blight.htm, st. 2
1840s, Poems (1847)
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Prudence
“The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.”
The Divinity College Address (1838) : full title “An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday Evening, July 15, 1838”, given at Harvard Divinity School : as contained in The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Writings, Emerson, ed. David M Robinson, Beacon Press (2004), p. 78 : ISBN 0807077194
“We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.”
Old Age
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.”
1839
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)
“Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.”
Walter Savage Landor, from The Dial, XII
“What is there in 'Paradise Lost' to elevate and astonish like Herschel or Somerville?”
Quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson, the Mind On Fire (Univ. of Calif Press 1995), p. 124
Plato; or, The Philosopher
1850s, Representative Men (1850)
“Circles, like the soul, are neverending and turn round and round without a stop”
This adage had previously appeared, identically worded, in Coleridge's The Statesman's Manual (1816)
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Circles
“And striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.”
May-Day
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Quotation and Originality
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
Ode, st. 5
1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)
“Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
Nor time unmake what poets know.”
"The Test", as quoted in Emerson As A Poet (1883) by Joel Benton, p. 40
“Language is the archives of history … Language is fossil poetry.”
1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), The Poet