Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes About Solitude
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Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.
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To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.
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Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.
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Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous.
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I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.
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Solitude is impractical, and society fatal. We must keep our head in the one and our hands in the other. The conditions are met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy.
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You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.
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It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation.
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Isolation must precede true society.
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Go cherish your soul; express companions; set your habits to a life of solitude; then will the faculties rise fair and full within.
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But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation.
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We walk alone in the world.
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Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend
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We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.
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Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.
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Heaven often protects valuable souls charged with great secrets, great ideas, by long shutting them up with their own thoughts.
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What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
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Solitude is naught and society is naught. Alternate them and the good of each is seen.
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The height, the deity of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude.
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My doom and my strength is to be solitary.
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Men consort in camp and town But the poet dwells alone.
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Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius, the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars.
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We never touch but at points.
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What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.
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These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
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The solitary knows the essence of the thought, the scholar in society only its fair face.
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These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.
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The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality.
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Two touch the string, The harp is dumb.
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Keep the town for occasions, but the habits should be formed in retirement.
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