"All life is an experiment. Place yourself..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
All life is an experiment. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment. I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom. Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.
More by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Words are alive. Cut them and they bleed.”
“We can see well into the past; we can guess shrewdly into the future, but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today.”
“The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversation; and this is a main function of life.”
More on Life
“It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.”
“The person I miss most is the one I could have been.”
“I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”
More on Experiment
“I simply want to tell the story of my experiments with truth...as my life consists of nothing but those experiments.”
“No theory of government was ever given a fairer test or a more prolonged experiment in a democratic country than democratic socialism received in Britain. Yet it was a miserable failure in every respect... To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukemia with leeches.”
“No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.”