Divine Library is a free online public library that includes free eBook downloads and free audio books.

We work with New Thought Seekers and Sharers around the world insuring that all New Thought Texts in the Public Domain are available for you to read on the web for free, forever!

"Unlike so many, we do not peddle the word of God for profit."
~ 2 Corinthians 2:17

Navigate through this book by clicking Next Page or Previous Page below the text of the page & jump directly to chapters using the chapter numbers above the text.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Serving New Thought is pleased to present

Ralph Waldo Emerson's

Nature, Addresses, and Lectures

Book page numbers, along with the number to the left of the .htm extension match the page numbers of the original books to ensure easy use in citations for research papers and books


Introduction - Nature - Commodity - Beauty - Language - Discipline - Idealism - Spirit - Prospects - The American Scholar - Divinity College, Cambridge - Literary Ethics - The Method of Nature - Man the Reformer - Lecture on the Times - The Transcendentalist - The Young American - Contents -


The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time, --- happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind. he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that which men in crowded cities find true for them also.

The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers; --- that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment,

page scan

103


PREVIOUS PAGE - NEXT PAGE

Support New Thought Library so that we can continue our work 
of putting all public domain New Thought texts at your fingertips for free!