A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 1

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Houghton Mifflin, 1887 - 809 pages

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Page 321 - Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom.
Page 320 - In all my lectures I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man. This the people accept readily enough, and even with commendation, as long as I call the lecture Art or Politics, or Literature or the Household; but the moment I call it Religion they are shocked, though it be only the application of the same truth which they receive elsewhere to a new class of facts.
Page 361 - Most of the persons whom I see in my own house I see across a gulf; I cannot go to them nor they come to me.
Page 376 - I thought there was a tragic element in the event, that might be more fully rendered, — in the painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, could not longer be endured, and he died of it.
Page 6 - When I was thirteen years old [he writes in his journal in 1839], my uncle Samuel Ripley one day asked me, ' How is it, Ralph, that all the boys dislike you and quarrel with you, whilst the grown people are fond of you?
Page 202 - I believe that the error of religionists lies in this, that they do not know the extent or the harmony or the depth of their moral nature; that they are clinging to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law...
Page 197 - I don't know what brought him, and we kept him one night and then he left us. I saw him go up the hill ; I did n't go with him to see him descend. I preferred to watch him mount and vanish like an angel.
Page 167 - I have sometimes thought that in order to be a good minister it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers. Were not a Socratic Paganism better than an effete superannuated Christianity...
Page 252 - The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration and in ecstasy.
Page 278 - Strange, coldwarm, attractive-repelling conversation with Margaret, whom I always admire, most revere when I nearest see, and sometimes love; yet whom I freeze and who freezes me to silence when we promise to come nearest.

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