Emerson on Nature and Self Reliance, Transcendentalism

Excerpts:

"Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright;

he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,'

 but quotes some saint or sage.

He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose.

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; 

they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. 

There is no time to them. "
Insist on yourself; never imitate.

Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare?

..And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.

 Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property.

 They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.

...Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. 

It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. 

For every thing that is given, something is taken.

 Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. 

What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under!

 But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave. ...

"When good is near you, when you have life in yourself,

 it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name;

—— the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. 

It shall exclude example and experience....

Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within.

But now we are a mob.

 Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home,

 to put itself in communication with the internal ocean,

 but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. "

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. 

This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.

 It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.

 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."

"Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go. "

Ralph Waldo is one of my all time favorite's, included with him are Thoreau, and Melville, Transcendentalist. 

The world need look no further than their own transcendental backyard of America to find those who speak with strength about the value of yourSelf.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American Transcendentalist poet, philosopher, lecturer, and essayist wrote Nature (1836);

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.

 I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me.

 But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.

 The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches.

 One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime.

 Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! 

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! 

But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.--Ch. 1

Self Reliance

"Ne te quæsiveris extra."

"Man is his own star; and the soul that can

Render an honest and a perfect man,

Commands all light, all influence, all fate;

Nothing to him falls early or too late.

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,

Our fatal shadows that walk by us still..."

"I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. 

The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. 

The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. 

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. 

Speak your latent conviction..."

Trust thyself: 

every heart vibrates to that iron string. 

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

 Great men have always done so,

 and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age,

 betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, 

working through their hands,

 predominating in all their being. And we are now men, 

and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny.

Self Reliance, Essay, by Emerson"

"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. 

He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. 

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world...

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony.

The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.