Sublime

Nature is so pervaded with human life, that there is something of humanity in all, and in every particular.

When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind and his involuntary

Emerson fut une lecture de jeunesse de Nietzsche. Il le cite en effet dès ses devoirs au collège de Pforta, il n’a pas 20 ans. Il a lu les Essais, puis les a perdus dans une gare. Il connaissait également La Conduite de la vie et Société et solitude. Dans les Fragments posthumes, il dit d’Emerson qu’il fut « l’homme de ce siècle le plus fécond en

“Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Adam Smith goes furthest with this link between morality and feeling in a book Emerson read in July 1824, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith argues that “as we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.”

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest.

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All good things are wild and free.

“Thou shalt not bear false witness,” is that you always express what you are. You cannot be one thing and express another. Emerson says, “What you are shouts so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”

Thoreau affirme qu’Emerson serait bien incapable de manier la brouette dans le jardin ; il voit dans cette incapacité pratique du pur esprit la preuve d’une différence fondamentale. Et, de fait, elle existe : Emerson est un philosophe en chambre, Thoreau, un penseur des champs. On imagine le second dévorer tout cru un petit mammifère, ce qu’il eut