Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and the chief proponent of transcendentalism. His works included: Nature, Essays, First and Second Series, Representative Men, The Conduct of Life, andEnglish Traits. He was born in 1803 and died in 1882.

We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling if he could teach us what the social birds say when they sit in the autumn council, talking together in the trees. The want of sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead bird. Beauty in the Conduct of Life.

 

The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to nature, and the skin or skeleton you show me is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington. Ibid.

 

The boy had juster views when he gazed at the shells on the beach or the flowers in the meadow, unable to call them by their names, than the man in the pride of his nomenclature. Ibid.

 

I wiped away the weeds and foam,

I fetched my sea-born treasure home;

But the poor, unsightly, noisome things

Had left their beauty on the shore,

With the sun and the sand and the wild

uproar.

Each and All, 1867.

 

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. "Nature," 1836.

 

It seems as if the day was not wholly profane in which we have given heed to some natural object. Essays, second series.

 

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. "Self Reliance," 1841.

 

At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. &emdash; "Nature," 1844

 

The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic . . . The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year. Ibid.

 

We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which calls us to solitude, and foretell the remotest future. Ibid.

 

He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the water, the plants, the heavens, and how to come to these enchantments, is the rich and royal man. Ibid.

 

It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to Plato, and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Ibid.

 

The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospective end; and nature hides in his happiness her own end, namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the race. Ibid.