Chapters (42)
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Foreword by Robert D. Richardson Jr.
- NATURE (1836)
- Introduction
- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- CHAPTER V
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VII
- CHAPTER VIII
- EARLY ESSAYS AND LECTURES
- Pray Without Ceasing (1826)
- Ethics (1837)
- The American Scholar (1837)
- Cherokee Letter (1838)
- The Divinity School Address (1838)
- From ESSAYS, FIRST SERIES (1841)
- History
- Self-Reliance
- The Over-Soul
- Circles
- From ESSAYS, SECOND SERIES (1844)
- The Poet
- Experience
- Politics
- From REPRESENTATIVE MEN (1850)
- Uses of Great Men
- Montaigne; or, the Skeptic
- LATER ESSAYS AND LECTURES
- Emancipation in the British West Indies (1844)
- Woman (1855)
- Thoreau (1862)
- POEMS
- Concord Hymn
- Additional Reading
- Note on the Text
- Ask Your Bookseller for these Bantam Classics
- About the Author
- Copyright
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.