Essays

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great…

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he…

Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal[705] circle through which a new one may be described. The use of literature is to afford us a platform…

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopædia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity,…

There is no virtue which is final; all are initial. The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must…

It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness day by day; but…

And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you have arrived at a fine pyrrhonism,[713] at an equivalence and indifferency of all…

I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened[714] by seeing the predominance of the saccharine principle throughout vegetable nature, and…

Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things partake could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of fixture…

Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-day the mood, the pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we are building up our being. Of lower…

The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal[715]…

"Self-respect is the early form in which greatness appears.... Stick to your own.... Follow the path your genius traces like the galaxy of heaven for…

"He that has light within his own clear breast May sit i' th' center, and enjoy bright day; But he that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts,…

"O mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the…

In connection with his essay on _Friendship_, the student should read the two other notable addresses on the same subject, one the speech by Cicero,…

It was a part of Emerson's philosophic faith that there is no such thing as giving,--everything that belongs to a man or that he ought to have,…