I believe it is the conviction of the purest men, that the net amount of man and man does not much vary. Each is incomparably superior to his companion in some faculty. His want of skill in other directions, has added to his fitness for his own work. Each seems to have some compensation yielded to him by his infirmity, and every hindrance operates as a concentration of his force. -NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS The speculations of one generation are the history of the next following. + -NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs, The world uncertain comes and goes; The lover rooted stays. I fancied he was fled, And, after many a year, Glowed unexhausted kindliness, Like daily sunrise there. My careful heart was free again, O friend, my bosom said, Through thee alone the sky is arched, Through thee the rose is red; All things through thee take nobler form, And look beyond the earth, The mill-round of our fate appears A sun-path in thy worth. Me too thy nobleness has taught The fountains of my hidden life -FRIENDSHIP Nature ature pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay nay. -NATURE There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them in his hand. -SPIRITUAL LAWS The more reason, the less government. In a sensible family, nobody ever hears the words "shall” and "sha'nt;" nobody commands, and nobody obeys, but all conspire and joyfully co-operate. Take off the roofs of hundreds of happy houses, and you shall see this order without ruler, and the like in every intelligent and moral society. Command is exceptional, and marks some break in the link of reason; as the electricity goes round the world without a spark or a sound, until there is a break in the wire or the water chain -CHARACTER Revolutions go not backward. The star once risen, though only one man in the hemisphere has yet seen its upper limb in the horizon, will mount and mount, until it becomes visible to other men, to multitudes, and climbs the zenith of all eyes. And so it is not a great matter how long men refuse to believe the advent of peace: war is on its last legs; and a universal peace is as sure as is the prevalence of civilisation over barbarism, of liberal governments over feudal forms The question for us is only How soon? -WAR (1838) There was somewhat military in his nature, not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise. It cost him nothing to say No; indeed, he found it much easier than to say Yes. The sign and credentials of the poet -THOREAU are, that he announces that which no man foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas, and an utterer of the necessary and causal. -THE POET + Nor, is the Peace principle to be carried into effect by fear. It can never be defended, it can never be executed, by cowards. Everything great must be done in the spirit of greatness. The manhood that has been in war must be transferred to the cause of peace, before war can lose its charm, and peace be venerable to men. -WAR (1838) + Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence, without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal Cause. -THE WORLD SPIRIT As all men have some access to primary Truth, so all have some Art or power of communication in their head; but only in the artist does it descend into the hand. + -INTELLECT Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-day the mood, the pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we are building up our being. Of lower states,―of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat; but the masterpieces of God, the total growths and universal movements of the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable. -CIRCLES We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more. I feel the same truth how often in my trivial conversation with my neighbours, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us. -THE OVER-SOUL We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope, knowing that the perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth. -SPIRITUAL LAWS The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later. -CULTURE Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man. . . . Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal. -INTELLECT The lesson of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense. Things seem to say one thing, and say the reverse. The appearance is immoral; the result is moral. -THE WORLD SPIRIT Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. What we call retribution is the universal necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears. If you see smoke, there must be fire. If you see a hand or a limb, you know that the trunk to which it belongs is there behind. + -COMPENSATION Feudalism and Orientalism had long enough thought it majestic to do nothing; the modern majesty consists in work. . . . What a man can do is his greatest ornament, and that he always consults his dignity by doing it. -LITERARY ETHICS Be content with a little light, so it be your own. Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise, nor accept another's dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of Truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all men's affections, in Art, in Nature, and in Hope. -LITERARY ETHICS |