Excerpts from the Essay “Experience” by Ralph Waldo Emerson (vegetarian), Part 2 of 2

“Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question.”

“Without any shadow of doubt, amidst this vertigo of shows and politics, I settle myself ever the firmer in the creed, that we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us.”

“If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry, — a narrow belt.”

“God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but with grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky. ‘You will not remember,’ he seems to say, ‘and you will not expect.’ All good conversation, manners, and action, come from a spontaneity which forgets usages, and makes the moment great.”

“Every man is an impossibility, until he is born; everything impossible, until we see a success. The ardors of piety agree at last with the coldest skepticism, — that nothing is of us or our works, — that all is of God. Nature will not spare us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having. I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal.”

“Patience and patience, we shall win at the last. In the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him.

Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.”