Literary Ethics

Ethics

An Oration delivered before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College, July 24, 1838 loc: 1724

Hence the historical failure, on which Europe and America have so freely commented. This country has not fulfilled what seemed the reasonable expectation of mankind. loc: 1741

men here, as elsewhere, are indisposed to innovation, and prefer any antiquity, any usage, any livery productive of ease or profit, to the unproductive service of thought. loc: 1749

The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do. loc: 1777

To feel the full value of these lives, as occasions of hope and provocation, you must come to know, that each admirable genius is but a successful diver in that sea whose floor of pearls is all your own. loc: 1794

ask it of the enveloping Now; the more quaintly you inspect its evanescent beauties, its wonderful details, its spiritual causes, its astounding whole, — so much the more you master the biography of this hero, and that, and every hero. Be lord of a day, through wisdom and justice, and you can put up your history books. loc: 1806

All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual loc: 1821

The hero is great by means of the predominance of the universal nature; loc: 1824

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great. loc: 1826

The vision of genius comes by renouncing the too officious activity of the understanding, and giving leave and amplest privilege to the spontaneous sentiment. loc: 1826

The man who stands on the seashore, or who rambles in the woods, seems to be the first man that ever stood on the shore, or entered a grove, his sensations and his world are so novel and strange. loc: 1850

Translate, collate, distil all the systems, it steads you nothing; for truth will not be compelled, in any mechanical manner. But the first observation you make, in the sincere act of your nature, though on the veriest trifle, may open a new view of nature and of man, loc: 1880

thought renews itself inexhaustibly every day, and the thing whereon it shines, though it were dust and sand, is a new subject with countless relations. loc: 1895

why must the student be solitary and silent? That he may become acquainted with his thoughts. loc: 1901

But go cherish your soul; expel companions; set your habits to a life of solitude; then, will the faculties rise fair and full within, like forest trees and field flowers; loc: 1903

Think alone, and all places are friendly and sacred. loc: 1909

Silence, seclusion, austerity, may pierce deep into the grandeur and secret of our being, and so diving, bring up out of secular darkness, the sublimities of the moral constitution. loc: 1924

Fatal to the man of letters, fatal to man, is the lust of display, the seeming that unmakes our being. loc: 1928

He must draw from the infinite Reason, on one side; and he must penetrate into the heart and sense of the crowd, on the other. From one, he must draw his strength; to the other, he must owe his aim. The one yokes him to the real; the other, to the apparent. At one pole, is Reason; at the other, Common Sense. If he be defective at either extreme of the scale, his philosophy will seem low and utilitarian; or it will appear too vague and indefinite for the uses of life. loc: 1980
Note: Ironically, it's Emerson who appears vague and indefinite, too lacking in common sense. Edit

When you shall say, ‘As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season;’ — then dies the man in you; loc: 2009

Be content with a little light, so it be your own. Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize, nor accept another’s dogmatism. loc: 2015

Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? loc: 2017