A brief and wonderful 88-pager.
Emerson counsels (admonishes?) us to never conform, to always speak our minds, and to create original work.
Here were my favorite excerpts, quotes:
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it; so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.
I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right.
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.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man;
But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future.
Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.
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 […] For every thing that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
Great works of art teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression, else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
Do your work, and I shall know you.
He who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits.
The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act.
“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.”
That’s a keeper. In general, the blogosphere doesn’t look too good in Waldo’s light, does it?
haha…i’m not in a position to comment :)