Back Ralph Waldo Emerson
Chapters (42)
  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Foreword by Robert D. Richardson Jr.
  4. NATURE (1836)
  5. Introduction
  6. CHAPTER I
  7. CHAPTER II
  8. CHAPTER III
  9. CHAPTER IV
  10. CHAPTER V
  11. CHAPTER VI
  12. CHAPTER VII
  13. CHAPTER VIII
  14. EARLY ESSAYS AND LECTURES
  15. Pray Without Ceasing (1826)
  16. Ethics (1837)
  17. The American Scholar (1837)
  18. Cherokee Letter (1838)
  19. The Divinity School Address (1838)
  20. From ESSAYS, FIRST SERIES (1841)
  21. History
  22. Self-Reliance
  23. The Over-Soul
  24. Circles
  25. From ESSAYS, SECOND SERIES (1844)
  26. The Poet
  27. Experience
  28. Politics
  29. From REPRESENTATIVE MEN (1850)
  30. Uses of Great Men
  31. Montaigne; or, the Skeptic
  32. LATER ESSAYS AND LECTURES
  33. Emancipation in the British West Indies (1844)
  34. Woman (1855)
  35. Thoreau (1862)
  36. POEMS
  37. Concord Hymn
  38. Additional Reading
  39. Note on the Text
  40. Ask Your Bookseller for these Bantam Classics
  41. About the Author
  42. Copyright
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Of course it needs the whole society to give the symmetry we seek. The parti-colored wheel must revolve very fast to appear white. Something is earned too by conversing with so much folly and defect. In fine, whoever loses, we are always of the gaining party. Divinity is behind our failures and follies also. The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man’s bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it. Like a bird which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, is the Power which abides in no man and in no woman, but for a moment speaks from this one, and for another moment from that one.