A man should learn
to detect and watch that gleam
of light which flashes across
his mind from within.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. With thanks to The Tao of Photography.
These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to forsee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Penguin, 1983), 270.
Let us be silent that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) U.S. poet, essayist and lecturer. (Thank you, dhammanovice)
(Source: stillcuriosity)
The invisible and imponderable is the sole fact.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Today in the river.
He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.
Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, the eternal One.
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (via libraryland). Let me just say that this little Tumblr here is my bible, more or less ;)
As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (via yama-bato)
The day of days, the great day of the feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the Unity in things, to the omnipresence of law; sees that what is, must be, and ought to be, or is the best. This beatitude dips from on high down on us, and we see. It is not in us so much as we are in it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (via libraryland)
We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
