Works, Volume 14Houghton Mifflin, 1887 |
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Common terms and phrases
Abel Adams abolitionists Alcott Alexander Ireland American appear Athenæum Club beautiful Ben Jonson Boston Carlyle church civilization Collected Writings Concord Concord Lyceum course DEAR LIDIAN Dial dined discourse divine England English eyes fact feel friends genius give Harriet Martineau hear heard heart Henry Thoreau human intellect invited journal labor lectures letter literary live London look Margaret Fuller Massachusetts meeting ment mind Miss Fuller moral Music Hall nation nature never night Over-Soul persons Phi Beta Kappa philosophy poet poetry politics RALPH WALDO EMERSON reform religion scholar seems sense sentiment slavery social society soul speak speech spirit talent talk Theodore Parker things thought tion Transcendentalist truth tures universal WALDO whole wish word young
Popular passages
Page 684 - Spring still makes spring in the mind When sixty years are told : Love wakes anew this throbbing heart, And we are never old. Over the winter glaciers I see the summer glow, And through the wild-piled snowdrift, The warm rosebuds below.
Page 641 - It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors.
Page 489 - Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. To-morrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day for all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays.
Page 636 - I might suggest that he who contents himself with dotting a fragmentary curve, recording only what facts he has observed, without attempting to arrange them within one outline, follows a system also, — a system as grand as any other, though he does not interfere with its vast curves by prematurely forcing them into a circle or ellipse, but only draws that arc which he clearly sees, or perhaps at a later observation a remote curve of the same orbit, and waits for a new opportunity, well assured...
Page 607 - Nature works through her appointed elements ; and ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.
Page 626 - I would have my book read as I have read my favorite books, — not with explosion and astonishment, a marvel and a rocket, but a friendly and agreeable influence, stealing like the scent of a flower or the sight of a new landscape on a traveller. I neither wish to be hated and defied by such as I startle, nor to be kissed and hugged by the young whose thoughts I stimulate.
Page 581 - Mr. Webster is a man who lives by his memory, a man of the past, not a man of faith or of hope. He obeys his powerful animal nature; and his finely developed understanding only works truly and with all its force, when it stands for animal good; that is, for property.
Page 411 - A young man, named Ralph Waldo Emerson, a son of my once-loved friend William Emerson, and a classmate of my lamented son George, after failing in the everyday avocations of a Unitarian preacher and schoolmaster, starts a new doctrine of transcendentalism, declares all the old revelations superannuated and worn out, and announces the approach of new revelations and prophecies.
Page 596 - I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute one state. I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.