Quotations and Fragments from Emerson's Essay "History"

"" - Emerson

The Emerson quotations and fragments that follow are all from his essay "History". To the question, "Is this the true Emerson?" the answer is: "He was a variegated writer-poet." In this series Emerson is usually quoted verbatim. - Tormod Kinnes

Contents

• Quotations from Emerson's "History"

History

We are to sit to get bullied or world-less otherwise.

R. W. Emerson

[A wise man] must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings.

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own age of chivalry.

You shall make me feel what periods you have lived. . . . the discovery of new lands; the opening of new sciences, and new regions .

Facts encumber [men], tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine the men of sense, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is truly man.

Magic, and all that is ascribed to it, is a deep presentiment of the powers of science.

Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done.

Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature. ¤

Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.

Your relations bundles or mafia (family) comes from what is enacted

Every law uses the state somehow and somewhat.*

How is it that our admiration often is a part of the enacted shows and "circuses" of men? *

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. ¤

A man is a bundle of relations.

"Doctor," said his wife to Martin Luther, one day, "how is it that, whilst subject to papacy, we prayed so often and with such fervour, while now we pray with the utmost coldness and very seldom?"

The deep apprehension may pierce to the truth

Does not the eye of the human embryo predict the light? the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound?

Every one must have observed faces and forms. ¤

The . . . unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.

[Greek] Adults acted with the simplicity and grace of children. They made vases.

By a deeper apprehension . . . the artist attains the power of awakening other souls.

We assume that we under like influence should be alike affected.

If we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride.

[Man at times] pierces to the truth through . . . the caricature of institutions.

The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of the forest trees with all their boughs to a festal or solemn arcade . . . The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. (7)

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and Agriculture are the two antagonist facts . . . In America and Europe, the nomadism is of trade and curiosity; a progress, certainly, from the gad-fly of Astaboras.

The manners of [the Greek] period are plain and fierce.

The picture Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. "After the army had crossed the river Teleboas in Armenia, there fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the ground covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked, and, taking an axe, began to split wood; whereupon others rose and did the like."

The air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature.

The transmigration of souls is no fable.

The poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations, but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession. (8)

There is no age or state of society or mode of action in history, to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life.

Summary

1. We are to sit to get bullied or world-less otherwise.
2. Your relations bundles or mafia (family) comes from what is enacted.
3. The deep apprehension may pierce to the truth of folks.

They were sitting on horses and got bullied from what was "enacted"

• The relations of the despot king did not get time to get deep enough that time.
• Sitting down on a horseback is not the sitting down that breeds lifelong relationships, then -

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