Representative Men: Nature, Addresses and Lectures

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Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1883 - 648 páginas
Representative Men contains seven essays, the first of which discusses the role great men play in society. The remaining six essays extoll the virtues of six men whom Emerson deemed great: Plato, Emanuel Swedenborg, Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Nature contains the essence of Emerson's transcendental philosophy in which the world of phenomena is seen as symbolic of the inner life, and individual freedom and self-reliance are emphasized. Emerson's addresses apply his doctrine to scholars, clergymen, and others.

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Página 21 - I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations: the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I...
Página 54 - Take, oh take those lips away, That so sweetly were forsworn ; And those eyes, the break of day, Lights that do mislead the morn : But my kisses bring again, , bring again, ' . -' Seals of love, but seal'd in vain.
Página 108 - The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these, but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides.
Página 93 - The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books are a weariness, — he has always the resource to live.
Página 71 - No man ever prayed heartily, without learning something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation. It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to search for objects. The invariable mark of wisdom, is to see the miraculous in the common.
Página 27 - The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all, — that perfectness...
Página 85 - The loyalty, well held to fools, does make Our faith mere folly: — Yet he that can endure To follow with allegiance a fallen lord, Does conquer him that did his master conquer, And earns a place i
Página 38 - There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, preexist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world. "Material objects...
Página 7 - Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe ? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of...
Página 94 - And labor is everywhere welcome ; always we are invited to work ; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.

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