Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation which arms itself with secret forces does not awaken until we are pricked and stung and sorely assailed. A great man is always willing to be little. Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn […]
Though slowly and with pain, the objects of our affections change, as the objects of thought do. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man, and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. But in health, the mind is presently seen again, its overarching vault, bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm loves […]
The Light by which we see this world comes out of the soul of the observer. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away: means, teachers, texts, temples fall. It lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it, one as much as another. All things are dissolved to their centre by their cause, and, in the universal miracle, […]
Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who would inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their […]
Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned […]
Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please. You can never have both. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
