Orts #720
Last Monday, May 25, was Ralph Waldo Emerson's 212th birthday.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me and I to them.
— Emerson, in an essay, Nature (1836)
. . . there is throughout nature something mocking, something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere, keeps no faith with us. All promise outruns the performance. We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated. . . It is the same with all our arts and performances. Our music, our poetry, our language itself are not satisfactions, but suggestions.
— Emerson, in an essay, Nature (1844)
The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.
— Emerson, in an essay, The American Scholar
In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. . . . People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
— Emerson, in an essay, Circles
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 city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.
— Emerson, in an essay, Circles