2/15/10
finally a dedication to emerson
i'll start off with my ALL TIME favorite quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson:I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.I first discovered Emerson in Junior year of high school and we read an excerpt of his essay Nature which is his most famous one next to Self-Reliance. Here's a really really good quote from that essay:
I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the hear appoints.
That was from Self-Reliance. A great essay about just being yourself in society, and just accepting everything around you, but not falling into the same pattern as everyone else, beating your own drum with pride.
My favorite though is still Nature, my favorite quote-the one i mentioned first- is from this essay. When i go through my Emerson book i see all these lines that i underlined and highlighted, and how the book's spine is completely broken. But i like it like that. That the book has been worn and read over and over again. okay so back to nature, when i first read this essay we read the first chapter that says the most to me. He's walking through the woods and talking about all the things he sees and how man doesn't pay attention to it, how really only the child and the poet (which he's not really good at...just sayin') really see nature.
At one moment when he's deep in the woods and has absorbed anything he says: "I'm glad to the brink of fear." & later when he deep into transcendence he writes this:
I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all ; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am a particle of God.SERIOUSLY! oh my gosh, he was a very religious person and that says so much! i don't know what to say really about it. if you don't know any emerson just read one of the two essays. i swear it'll change your life, i will say whole heartedly that it changed mine.
but i'm going to stop because i can go on forever about emerson. but'll i'll end the post with my number two favorite quote. (it's pretty long)
January 7, 1832. There is a process in the mind very analogous to crystallization in the mineral kingdom. I think of a particular fact of a singular beauty and interest. In thinking of it I am led to many more thoughts which show themselves first partially and afterwards more fully. But in the multitude of them I see no order. When I would present them to others they have no beginning. There is no method. Leave them now, & return to them again. Domesticate them in your mind, do not force them into arrangement too hastily & presently you shall find they will take their own order. And the order they assume is divine. It is God's architecture.
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