Ralph Waldo Emerson citations

Page 19

“Qu’est-ce qu’une herbe? Une plante dont les vertus n’ont pas encore été découvertes […].”

“Le premier secret du succès est la confiance en soi, la conviction que si vous êtes là, c’est que les pouvoirs de l’Univers vous y ont mis avec un motif, une tâche qui vous est strictement assignée de par votre constitution, et qu’aussi longtemps que vous y travaillerez, vous vous trouverez bien et réussirez.”

“Chaque minute que vous êtes en colère, vous perdez soixante secondes de bonheur.”

“Construisez donc votre propre monde.”

“Écrivez dans votre cœur que chaque jour est le meilleur jour de l'année.”

“Go put your creed into your deed,
Nor speak with double tongue.”

“I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home? I have been quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. …. He that does not fill a place at home, cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a larger crowd. You do not think you will find anything there which you have not seen at home? The stuff of all countries is just the same. Do you suppose there is any country where they do not scald milk-pans, and swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish? What is true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.”

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

“It is time to be old,
To take in sail: -
The god of bounds,
Who sets to seas a shore,
Came to me in his fatal rounds,
And said: 'No more!”

“The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empires but is not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth.”

“Coal is a portable climate.”

“Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.”

“There is properly no history; only biography.”

“My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.”

“Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

“We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox.”

“The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.”

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

“It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men.”

“The music that can deepest reach,
And cure all ill, is cordial speech.”

“The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.”

“Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.”

“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.”

“I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.”

“Nothing can be preserved that is not good.”

“Every man is wanted and no man is wanted much.”

“Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.”

“A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.”

“Act, if you like,—but you do it at your peril. Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament. The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and his friends cleave to the form, and lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monastery and his dance; and, although each prates of spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti-spiritual.”

“There is no knowledge that is not power.”

“Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.”

“History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, — see how it could and must be.”

“I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.”

“A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.”