I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea.
I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch -
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.
_________
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He was born in Boston, Massachusetts (1803). He started out as a Unitarian minister, but when his wife died in 1831 he questioned his faith and eventually he left his position. He had liked giving sermons, and he was a great public speaker, so he started giving lectures in the Boston area.
Public lectures were becoming more and more common in New England in the middle of the nineteenth century, and Emerson was one of the first people to make his living off of them. Many of his first lectures were on natural history. In November of 1833, he gave a lecture for the Natural History Society. The lecture, "The Uses of Natural History," was so successful that Emerson was invited to give more lectures on science by many other organizations in the winter of 1834.
In 1836, his first great essay, "Nature," was published in Boston, and it got a lot of attention in America and England. That winter, Emerson was invited to give a series of twelve lectures in the Masonic Temple in Boston. The subjects ranged from "Philosophy of History" to "Trades and Professions."
By this time, lecturing had become his main source of income, and Emerson needed the money to take care of his family. In order to make as much money as he could from the lectures, he wrote his own advertising and oversaw ticket sales himself. Tickets cost two dollars for twelve lectures, and they could be bought at Boston bookstores. Emerson considered the lectures a success: each lecture drew about 350 people, which was pretty good considering he was competing against many other lecturers in Boston at the time.
He often scheduled three or four lectures a week, each in a different city. His reputation grew quickly, and by the winter of 1840, more people went to his lectures in New York than those of all the other speakers combined.
Emerson began giving lectures outside of New England, as far west as St. Louis, and also in England and France. By the end of his life he was making about a hundred dollars per lecture, and he had become a celebrity in America and Europe.
Emerson said, "Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote those books."
A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.
All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.
All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
As we grow old…the beauty steals inward.
Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live, as well as to think.
Children are all foreigners.
Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.
Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm.
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.
Give all to love; obey thy heart.
God enters by a private door into every individual.
He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.
I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.
I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the Stern Fact, the Sad Self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.
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