We spend our incomes for paint and paper, for a hundred trifles, I know not what, and not for the things of a man. Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; 't is not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs so much. + Oft in streets or humbler places I detect far wandered graces, -MAN THE REFORMER In lowly homes have lost their way. -ODE TO BEAUTY + Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or men on an unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited for some better sympathy and intimacy to come. But whence and when? To-morrow will be like to-day. Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live. -PRUDENCE The world is his, who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance,— by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow. + -THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR A man should not tell me that he has walked among the angels: his proof is that his eloquence makes me one. -SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC + Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he who would be a great Soul in future, must be a great Soul now. WORSHIP If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburthen the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn. -SELF-RELIANCE "Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!"-Solitude seems to say, "there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power." -EXPERIENCE I ought not to allow any man, because he has broad lands, to feel that he is rich in my presence. I ought to make him feel that I can do without his riches, that I cannot be bought,-neither by comfort, neither by pride, and though I be utterly penniless, and receiving bread from him, that he is the poor man beside me. + -MAN THE REFORMER Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams. -BEAUTY Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the Soul; unbelief, in denying them. -MONTAIGNE The Soul lets no man go without some visitations and holy-days of a diviner presence. -NEW ENGLAND REFORMER The time is coming when all men will see, that the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting, overpowering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to be and to grow. -ADDRESS TO CLASS IN DIVINITY COLLEGE + The disease with which the human mind now labors is want of faith. Men do not believe in a power of education. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We renounce all high aims. We believe that the defects of so many perverse, and so many frivolous people, who make up society, are organic, and society is a hospital of incurables. -NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS Everybody knows as much as the savant. The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions. -INTELLECT The hero is he who is immovably centred. The main difference between people seems to be, that one man can come under obligations on which you can rely,—is obligable; and another is not. As he has not a law within him, there's nothing to tie him to. -COMPENSATIONS BY THE WAY We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence is in its infancy. As a political power, as the rightful lord who is to tumble all rulers from their chairs, its presence is hardly yet suspected. + -POLITICS Few people discern that it rests with the master or the mistress what service comes from the man or the maid; that this identical hussy was a titelar spirit in one house, and a haridan in the other. All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair. If you are proposing only your own, the other party must deal a little hardly by you. If you deal generously, the other, though selfish and unjust, will make an exception in your favour, and Ideal truly with you. When I asked an iron-master about the slag and cinder in railroad iron,-"Oh," he said, "there's always good iron to be had: if there's cinder in the iron, 'tis because there was cinder in the pay.' -COMPENSATIONS BY THE WAY Divinity is behind our failures and follies also. The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things. -EXPERIENCE Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this. -AN AMERICAN SCHOLAR A humorous friend of mine thinks, that the reason why Natureis so perfect in her art, and gets up such inconceivably fine sunsets, is, that she has learned how, at last, by dint of doing the same thing so very often. -CONDUCT OF LIFE We are full of superstitions. Each class fixes its eyes on the advantages it has not; the refined, on rude strength; the democrat, on birth and breeding. One of the benefits of a college education is, to show the boy its little avail. -CULTURE That only which we have within, can we see without. If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none. If there is grandeur in you, you will find grandeur in porters and sweeps. He only is rightly immortal, to whom all things are immortal. -WORSHIP If you would not be known to do any thing, never do it. A man may play the fool in the drifts of a desert, but every grain of sand shall seem to see. He may be a solitary eater, but he cannot keep his foolish council. A broken complexion, a swinish look, ungenerous acts and the want of due knowledge,—all blab. It is only as a man puts off from himself all external support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? -SELF-RELIANCE |