Quotes About Emerson

My heroes are, above all, the great 19th-century Americans: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and the others. I love the way they think.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

Emerson and Darwin each found in nature a portal between the realm of the profane and the realm of the sacred. Even if the hive switch was originally a group-related adaptation, it can be flipped when you're alone by feelings of awe in nature, as mystics and ascetics have known for millennia.

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.1 Emerson

For Emerson, the value and distinction of transcendentalism was very much akin to this swerving and rolling away from acute definition. All the world is taken in through the eye, to reach the soul, where it becomes more, representative of a realm deeper than appearances: a realm ideal and sublime, the deep stillness that is, whose whole proclamation is the silence and the lack of material instance in which, patiently and radiantly, the universe exists.

Emerson's fame as a writer and thinker was firmly established during his lifetime by the books he gave to the world.

When we can't piece together the puzzle of our own lives, remember the best view of a puzzle is from above. Let Him help put you together.

The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.

Emerson, a shrewder prophet [than Freud], could have told Freud that psychoanalysis was another form of the triumph of literary culture over science, as well as over religion and philosophy.

Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history.

Whitman was Emerson translated from the abstract into the concrete.

Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. This limbo and dust-hole of thought is presided over by a certain reason, too.

Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth?-Or at least, "Do you care about the same truth?

There was a sketch group at Emerson, and if you could believe it, we were the cool kids. That's how Emerson rolls. I was a film major, but I spent most of my time doing that.

When Emerson poetically noted that mosses favour the north sides of trees ('The moss upon the forest bark, was pole-star when the night was dark') he really meant lichens, for in the nineteenth century mosses and lichens weren't distinguished. True mosses aren't actually fussy about where they grow, so they are no good as natural compasses.

If, as Emerson wrote, every word was once an idea, every cliché was once a revelation.

Life, said Emerson, consists in what a man is thinking all day. If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine. I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at night. But I don't ask to go back to America, to be put in a double harness again, to work the treadmill. No, I prefer to be a poor man of Europe. God knows, I am poor enough; it only remains to be a man.

Life, said Emerson, consists in what a man is thinking all day.

During my first years in the Sierra, I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite.

And yet I built this house as my pioneer theme along the perforation of my very own toilet roll. For perforation read wipe of shit. The shit of for shit read this an Amazon for Amazon read Emerson.

Ralph Waldo Emerson crossing a wintry New England commons in "Nature": Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. 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.

The only way to overcome your fears is to do the thing you fear, as Emerson wrote, and the death of fear is certain.

Emerson argued that "the whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that men are convertible, and they are. They want awakening, [and for that purpose they need teachers] to get the soul out of bed, out of her deep habitual sleep." That

I went to Concord, a young woman from the backwoods, firm in belief that Emerson was the first of living men. He was the modern Moses who had talked with God apart and could interpret Him to us.