Méditations Poétiques (1820), Sermon 2
“Man, limited by his nature, is infinite in his desires.”
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI
Context: The heavens have fallen on our heads! What a tremendous idea! It is the loftiest cry that life hurls. That was the cry of deliverance for which I had been groping until then. I had had a foreboding it would come, because a thing of glory like a poet's song always gives something to us poor living shadows, and human thought always reveals the world. But I needed to have it said explicitly so as to bring human misery and human grandeur together. I needed it as a key to the vault of the heavens.
These heavens, that is to say, the azure that our eyes enshrine, purity, plenitude — and the infinite number of suppliants, the sky of truth and religion. All this is within us, and has fallen upon our heads. And God Himself, who is all these kinds of heavens in one, has fallen on our heads like thunder, and His infinity is ours.
Studies of a Biographer: Second Series (London: Duckworth, 1902) vol. 3, p. 261
Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
Lectures on the Essence of Religion http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/lectures/index.htm (1851)
1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)
“God is Infinite and His Shadow is also infinite.”
18 : The Four Journeys, p. 22.
The Everything and the Nothing (1963)
Context: God is Infinite and His Shadow is also infinite. The Shadow of God is the Infinite Space that accommodates the infinite Gross Sphere which, with its occurrences of millions of universes, within and without the ranges of men's knowledge, is the Creation that issued from the Point of Finiteness in the infinite Existence that is God.
“If it is pleasing to observe in nature her desire to paint God in all his works”
Conversation on Epictetus and Montaigne
Context: If it is pleasing to observe in nature her desire to paint God in all his works, in which we see some traces of him because they are his images, how much more just is it to consider in the productions of minds the efforts which they make to imitate the essential truth, even in shunning it, and to remark wherein they attain it and wherein they wander from it, as I have endeavored to do in this study.
