Be Your ‘Self’
The only true economy of time is to rely without interval on your own judgment. Keep the eye & ear open to all impressions, but deepen no impression by effort, but take the opinion of the Genius within, what ought to be retained by you & what rejected by you. Keep, that is, the upright position. Resign yourself to your thoughts, & then every object will make that mark, that modification of your character which it ought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 5:6
It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centred. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 4:367
Men do not imagine that they are anything more than fringes and tassles to the institutions into which they are born. They take the law from things; They serve their property; Their trade or profession; Books; Other men; Some religious dogma; Some political party or school of opinion that has been palmed upon them; And bow the neck and the knee and the soul to their own creation…
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The early lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol 11, Cambridge 1964, p218
Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.
Siddhartha Gautama - “The Buddha”
The prophets of monotheism did not denounce heathen religions as idolatrous primarily because they worshipped several gods instead of one. The essential difference between monotheism and polytheism is not one of the number of gods, but lies in the fact of Self alienation. Man spends his energy, his artistic capacities on building an idol, and then he worships this idol, which is nothing but the result of his own human effort. His life forces have flown into a “thing” and this thing, having become an idol, is not experienced as a result of his own productive effort, but as something apart from himself, over and against him which he worships and to which he submits…[Such a] man does not experience himself as the active bearer of his own powers and richness, but as an impoverished “thing” dependent on powers outside of himself, unto whom he has projected his living substance.
Erich Fromm
The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man,- present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is a priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the individual to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,- a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.
In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - “The American Scholar”
Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be. Be sure you give men the best of your wares, though they be poor enough, and the gods will help you to lay up a better store for the future. Man’s noblest gift to man is his sincerity, for it embraces his integrity also. Let him not dole out of himself anxiously, to suit their weaker or stronger stomachs, but make a clean gift of himself, and empty his coffers at once. I would be in society as in the landscape; in the presence of nature there is no reserve, nor effrontery.
Henry David Thoreau - Diary Entry [January 24 1841]
Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - “Nature”
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World. He said in this jubilee of sublime emotion, "I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think." But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, "This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say be was a man." The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - “Divinity School Address”
Man or woman! I might tell how I like you, but cannot;
And might tell what it is in me, and what it is in you, but cannot;
And might tell that pining I have—that pulse of my nights and days.
Behold! I do not give lectures, or a little charity;
When I give, I give myself.
You there, impotent, loose in the knees!
Open your scarf’d chops till I blow grit within you;
Spread your palms, and lift the flaps of your pockets;
I am not to be denied—I compel—I have stores plenty and to spare;
And anything I have I bestow.
I do not ask who you are—that is not so important to me;
You can do nothing, and be nothing, but what I will infold you.
To cotton-field drudge or cleaner of privies I lean;
On his right cheek I put the family kiss,
And in my soul I swear, I never will deny him.
On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes;
(This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.)
To any one dying—thither I speed, and twist the knob of the door;
Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed;
Let the physician and the priest go home.
I seize the descending man, and raise him with resistless will.
O despairer, here is my neck;
By God! you shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me.
I dilate you with tremendous breath—I buoy you up;
Every room of the house do I fill with an arm’d force,
Lovers of me, bafflers of graves.
Sleep! I and they keep guard all night;
Not doubt—not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you;
I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself;
And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so.
Walt Whitman - “Song of Myself” (Section 40) 1855, pp44-45
"Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them."
Jesus of Nazareth - Luke. 7/13-20
“No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers. The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.
Jesus of Nazareth - Luke 6:43-45
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