11 November 2004
Individual vs. Community: Quotations (Emerson)
1. “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius.”
2. “We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.”
3. “A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace.”
4. “Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it…”
5. “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”
6. “There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; —though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar; it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.”
7. “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
8. “This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true.”
9. “The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them."
10. “Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you say to-day."
11. “To be great is to be misunderstood."
12. “Always scorn appearances, and you always may."
13. “Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day."
14. “For my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun."
15. “Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming."
16. “We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lies."
17. “Power is in nature the essential measure of right."
18. “What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love."
19. “We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons."
20. “Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will."
21. “As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect."
22. “Travelling is a fool’s paradise… We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind?"
23. “Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other."
24. “Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them."
25. “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself."