The following snippets are some of my favorite takeaways from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, Nature.
They can be found here, along with my favorite passages from other books and essays that I’ve recently read: http://brandonbartneck.com/favorite-book-takeaways/.
From Nature…
“…the simple perception of natural forms is a delight.”
“To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again. The heavens change every moment, and reflect their glory or gloom on the plains beneath.”
“But the beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the least part. The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the life, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon, and tis mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.”
“Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural action is graceful.”
“…love of beauty is Taste…creation of beauty is Art.”
“A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character.”
“We know more from nature than we can at will communicate”
“Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.”
“…is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. Prophet and priest, David, Isaiah, Jesus, have drawn deeply from this source. This ethical character so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, as to seem the end for which it was made.”
“Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use. When a thing has served an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior service.”
“A rule of one art, or a law of one organization, holds true throughout nature.”
“…what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?…Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is only in the apocalypse of the mind, is alike useful and alike venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is ideal to me, so long as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses.”
“The least change in our point of view, gives the whole world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides needs only to get into a coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show.”
“Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty as his main end; the other Truth.”
“…religion and ethics, which may be fitly called, -the practice of ideas, or the introduction of ideas into life,”
“Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.”
“The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.”
“Idealism is a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than those of carpentry and chemistry.”
“…that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old.”
“This view, which admonishes me where the sources of wisdom and power lie, and points to virtue as to, ‘The golden key which opes the palace of eternity,’ carries upon its face the highest certificate of truth, because it animates me to create my own world through the purification of my soul.”
“When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought or multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity.”
“The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit.”
“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”
“He should see that he can live all history in his own person”
“The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance.”
“…nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely.”
“The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of the forest trees…No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods, without being struck with the architectural appearance of the grove.”
“Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.”
“…fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are successful; that justice is not done now…what constitutes a manly success, instead of confronting and convicting the world from the truth; announcing the presence of the soul; the omnipotence of the will; and so establishing the standard of good and ill, of success and falsehood.”
“Ever act rewards itself, or, in other words integrates itself, in a twofold manner; first in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly in the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the retribution.”
“…in nature nothing can be given, all things are sold.”
“You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.”
“Every thing has two sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage has its tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine of compensation is not the doctrine of indifferency. The thoughtless say, on hearing these representations, – What boots it to do well? there is one event to good and evil; if I gain any good I must pay for it; if I lose any good I gain some other; all actions are indifferent. There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own nature.”
(When contrasting the trade-offs inherent in worldly actions with the different nature of virtue” There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action I properly am; in a virtuous act I add to the world…there is no tax on the good of virtue, for that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute existence, without any comparative.”
-Brandon