Ihum 261 Final Thoreau/emerson Only

Front 1

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism.

Back 1

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Front 2

The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Front 3

The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Front 4

Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Front 5

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Front 6

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Front 7

In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Front 8

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.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Front 9

There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,-no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,-my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,-all mean egotism vanishes.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Front 10

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar

Front 11

It cam into him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. It cam to him, business; it went from him, poetry.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar

Front 12

Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation,-the act of thought,-is transferred to the record.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar

Front 13

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst... They are for nothing but to inspire.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar

Front 14

The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar

Front 15

They pin me down. They look backward and not forward.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar

Front 16

But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar

Front 17

The Englishh dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar

Front 18

One must be an inventor to read well.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar

Front 19

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar

Front 20

We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar

Front 21

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.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Front 22

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Front 23

Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Front 24

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine Providence has found for you...

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Front 25

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Front 26

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Front 27

"But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Front 28

Virtues are in the popular estimate rather the exception than the rule.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Front 29

My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Front 30

Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Front 31

"If I should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set in on fire,--"

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Thoreau

Walden

Front 32

"God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us."

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Thoreau

Walden

Front 33

"For a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone."

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Thoreau

Walden

Front 34

"For my part, I could easily do without the postoffice. I think that there are very few important communications made through it."

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Thoreau

Walden

Front 35

"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow."

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Thoreau

Walden

Front 36

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

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Thoreau

Walden