Work
Essays
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Michel de Montaigne, Oscar Wilde, Henry David Thoreau
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About this work
Essays here gathers the short-form reflections of several masters of the form, from Montaigne, who effectively invented the modern essay in the 1500s, to Emerson, Thoreau, and Wilde. The essay is philosophy at human scale: one mind thinking on paper, in public, with no obligation to reach a system. What unites these writers is the refusal to take received opinion at face value.
About the author — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 to 1882) led the American Transcendentalist movement and became its clearest voice for self-reliance and individual conscience. His essays urged readers to trust their own judgment over the pressure of society, an argument that still defines a strand of American thought.
12 quotes from this work
To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
We are always getting ready to live, but never living.
A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.
If I am pressed to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because it was he; it was I.
We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we do not believe, and cannot disengage ourselves from what we condemn.
Things are not so painful and difficult in themselves, but our weakness and cowardice make them so.
He who should teach men to die would teach them to live well.
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
He to whom the present is the only thing that is present knows nothing of the age in which he lives.
We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes.
People also ask
What are Emerson's most famous essays?
Self-Reliance is the best known, followed by Nature, Compensation, and The Over-Soul. Self-Reliance is where his case for trusting your own conscience is stated most directly.
What is the main idea of Emerson's essays?
That you should follow your own conscience rather than conform. For Emerson, becoming fully yourself means trusting your inner sense of what is right over the expectations of the crowd.
Why do people still read these essays?
Because the form ages well. A good essay is one honest mind working through a question, and the questions these writers chose, how to live, what to value, when to dissent, never went away.