81
" Ahmakça tutarlılık, küçük akılların gulyabanisidir, küçük devlet adamları, filozoflar ve ilahiyatçılar ise tapar ona. Tutarlılıkla yüce bir ruhun yapacağı kesinlikle hiçbir şey yoktur. Duvardaki gölgesiyle ilgilenir. Şu an ne düşündüğünü ağır sözlerle ifade et, yarın da yine düşündüğünü ağır sözlerle ifade et, bugün söylediğin her şeyle çelişse bile. "Ah o zaman kesin yanlış anlaşılacaksın." Yanlış anlaşılmak o kadar kötü bir şey mi ki? Pisagor yanlış anlaşılmıştı, Sokrates de, İsa da, Luther de Kopernik de Galileo ve Newton da, ete bürünmüş her saf ve bilge ruh da yanlış anlaşılmıştı. Büyük olmak yanlış anlaşılmaktır. "
― Ralph Waldo Emerson , Self-Reliance and Other Essays
89
" We need books of this tart cathartic virtue, more than books of political science, or of private economy. Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front. The violations of the laws of nature by our predecessors and our contemporaries are punished in us also. The disease and deformity around us certify the infraction of natural, intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed such compound misery. A lockjaw that bends a man’s head back to his heels, hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes, insanity that makes him eat grass; war, plague, cholera, famine indicate a certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by human crime, must have its outlet by human suffering. Unhappily, almost no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation. "
― Ralph Waldo Emerson , Self-Reliance and Other Essays
90
" Men in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are spawn, and are called “the mass” and “the herd.” In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, one or two approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in the hero or the poet their own green and crude being,—ripened; yes, and are content to be less, so that may attain to its full stature. What a testimony, full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of his own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief! The poor and the low find some amends to their immense moral capacity, for their acquiescence in a political and social inferiority. They are content to be brushed like flies from the path of a great person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They sun themselves in the great man’s light, and feel it to be their own element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of blood to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and conquer. He lives for us, and we live in him. "
― Ralph Waldo Emerson , Self-Reliance and Other Essays
100
" The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith, is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind. It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both speculative and practical, that is, philosophy and virtue, take. For, seen in the light of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. "
― Ralph Waldo Emerson , Self-Reliance and Other Essays