Nature — Review & Quotes

Review

There is a moment when you find yourself in front of something beautiful, whether its nature or art, and you recognize that you do not have the words inside yourself to adequately capture the beauty, or even respond to it in any meaningful way. You simply sit back and say, ‘Wow.’ Other times, you think “maybe I’m too dumb to understand what I’m seeing.” Emerson makes me feel a bit of both.

While I can’t reflect on every thought Emerson had (in large part because I can’t comprehend every though Emerson had), there are a few quotes that struck me in a way that even I could understand. And reflecting on those nuggets makes me eager to understand the rest.

“What tedious training, day after day, year after year, never ending, to form the common sense; what continual reproduction of annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of little men; what disputing of prices, what reckonings of interest — and all to form the Hand of the mind — to instruct us that ‘good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed!’” (Book: Nature)

“An action is the perfection and publication of thought.” (Book: Nature)

“Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty as his main end,; the other Truth.” (Book: Nature)

“All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler’s trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar’s garret. Yet line for line and point for point your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build therefore your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions.” (Book: Nature)

Quotes From The Essays

“Books, Emerson insisted more than a century ago, are for the student’s idle hours; let him read only when he cannot think for himself. Colleges likewise are secondary or even tertiary for man thinking; they look backward and not forward; ‘they pin me down.’” (Introduction)

“These paradoxes, however, would cause Emerson no distress if he were living today; he believed that books and colleges when rightly used can accomplish an indispensable end. But they serve us only ‘when they aim not to drill but to create’ — when they gather from afar every ray of genius and, by their concentrated fires, set the heart of man on flame.” (Introduction)

“In philosophy, Emerson was a transcendentalist. He believed in the ‘over-soul’ — the universal soul of which everything living was a part.” (Introduction)

“‘What is popularly called transcendentalism among us is idealism,’ Emerson once said. In contrast with the materialist, who reasoned from facts, history and the animal wants of man, the idealist believed in ‘the power of thought and of will, in inspiration, in miracle, in individual culture.’ It was a centrifugal manifestation of faith in God.” (Introduction)

“Not everyone was willing to follow Emerson so far from the material world into the world of intuition. Identifying man with God seemed like heresy to some of the clergy.” (Introduction)

“But the effect of this belief on Emerson was transcendent. To believe himself part of universal wisdom gave him a wonderful sense of freedom. IT was the ultimate liberation. It was creative. Life seemed good fundamentally; nature and man could be trusted. Life was something not to be learned but to be lived. Now was the appointed hour for making a fresh start.” (Introduction)

“‘One must be a creator to read well.’ The scholar’s preoccupation with bookish learning seemed moribund to him. He urged the scholar to become a man of action and learn directly from life: ‘Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town; in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the end of mastering in all facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions.’” (Introduction)

“He complained that religion was treated in the pulpit ‘as if God were dead.’” (Introduction)

“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should we not enjoy an original relation to the universe?” (Book: Nature)

“There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.” (Book: Nature)

“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.” (Book: Nature)

“Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance.” (Book: Nature)

“Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other’s hands for the profit of man.” (Book: Nature)

“The eye is the best of artists.” (Book: Nature)

“There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful.” (Book: Nature) — really think about what light is

“The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired so long as we can see far enough.” (Book: Nature)

“Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.” (Book: Nature)

“Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness.” (Book: Nature)

“Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.” (Book: Nature)

“Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.” (Book: Nature)

“The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material image more or less luminous arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation. It is the working of the Original Cause through the instruments he has already made.” (Book: Nature) — that moment you feel an idea has become so real you can reach out and touch it

“We know more from nature than we can at will communicate.” (Book: Nature)

“‘Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth,’ is the fundamental law of criticism. A life in harmony with Nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.” (Book: Nature)

“What tedious training, day after day, year after year, never ending, to form the common sense; what continual reproduction of annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of little men; what disputing of prices, what reckonings of interest — and all to form the Hand of the mind — to instruct us that ‘good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed!’” (Book: Nature) — training your common sense unto action

“Water is good to drink, coal to burn, wool to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun, nor coal eaten. The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man. What is not good they call the worst, and what is not hateful they call the best.”(Book: Nature)

“Man is greater that he can see this, and the universe less, because Time and Space relations vanish as laws are known.”(Book: Nature) — all knowing is all powerful

“A rule of one art, or a law of one organization, holds true throughout nature. So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garment of Nature, and betrays its source in Universal Spirit. For it pervades Thought also. Every universal truth which we express in words, implies or supposes every other truth. Omne verum vero consonat.” (Book: Nature)

“An action is the perfection and publication of thought.” (Book: Nature)

“Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years.” (Book: Nature) — change your perspective

“The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other, as fluid, and impresses his being thereon.” (Book: Nature)

“Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty as his main end,; the other Truth.” (Book: Nature) — ask yourself what is your main end?

“It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science, and religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the external world.” (Book: Nature)

“[Nature] is a watcher more than a doer, and it is a doer, only that it may the better watch.” (Book: Nature)

“Of the ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he that thinks most, will say least.” (Book: Nature)

“Idealism is a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than those of carpentry and chemistry.” (Book: Nature)

“Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man?” (Book: Nature)

“But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known qualities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility.” (Book: Nature)

“A man is a god in ruin.” (Book: Nature)

“Man is the dwarf of himself.” (Book: Nature)

“At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage.” (Book: Nature)

“The difference between the actual and the ideal force of man is happily figured by the schoolmen, in saying, that the knowledge of man is an evening knowledge, but that of God is a morning knowledge.” (Book: Nature)

“There are innocent men who worship God after the tradition of their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet extended to the use of all their faculties.” (Book: Nature)

“Is not prayer also a study of truth — a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.” (Book: Nature)

“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.” (Book: Nature)

“To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables.” (Book: Nature)

“So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect — What is truth? and of the affections — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will.” (Book: Nature)

“All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler’s trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar’s garret. Yet line for line and point for point your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build therefore your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions.” (Book: Nature)