"The experience of each new age requires..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet
More by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.”
“Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?”
“In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation.”
More on Experience
“It [music] has an awakening function. Life is a rhythm. Art is an organization of rhythms. Music is a fundamental art that touches our will system. In Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea he speaks of music as the sound that awakens the will. The rhythm of the music awakens certain life rhythms, ways of living and experiencing life. So it's an awakener of life.”
“For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.”
“I should say that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posterity; for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.”
More on Poetry
“Whoever would understand the poetMust go into the poet's country.[Ger., Wer den Dichter will verstehenMuss in Dichters Lande gehen.]”
“The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,Doth glance from heaven to earth,From earth to heaven.”
“For the poet is a light winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer with him. When he has not attained this state he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles.”