Ralph waldo emerson friendship. Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Friendship Archives 2022-10-19
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Ralph Waldo Emerson was a 19th century American essayist and philosopher who is best known for his ideas about individuality, transcendentalism, and nature. One of the themes that runs throughout his work is the importance of friendship.
Emerson believed that friendship was a fundamental human need, and that it was essential for personal growth and happiness. In his essay "Friendship," he wrote: "A friend is one before whom I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another."
For Emerson, a true friend was someone who you could be completely honest and open with, and who would accept you for who you are. He argued that true friendship was based on mutual respect and understanding, and that it required effort and dedication to maintain.
Emerson also believed that friendship was a source of inspiration and enlightenment. He wrote: "The only way to have a friend is to be one. Friendship cannot be bought, nor borrowed, nor entreated, but must be the spontaneous outgrowth of personal character. It is the flower that blooms in the deeps of the soul, the fruit that is full of natural goodness."
In other words, Emerson believed that true friendship could not be forced or fabricated, but rather that it was a natural and organic relationship that developed between two people with compatible personalities and values. He also argued that being a good friend required that you be true to yourself and your own values, and that you be willing to support and encourage your friends in their own personal growth and development.
Overall, Ralph Waldo Emerson's view of friendship was one of great depth and appreciation. He saw it as a vital part of the human experience, and something that could bring great joy, fulfillment, and growth to our lives.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Friendship Archives
I go in that I may seize them, I go out that I may seize them. Shall I not be as real as the things I see? Let us give over this mendicancy. He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure that greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves. Emerson asserts that a friendship will not be good unless it is given effort and patience. Bashfulness and apathy are a tough husk, in which a delicate organization is protected from premature ripening.
Happy is the house that shelters a friend! To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not? Every man alone is sincere. I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. I cannot choose but rely on my own poverty more than on your wealth. There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named.
It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if so we could lose any genuine love. The prize will not be sent to you. Good friends would not; use friendships to get ahead in life, leave old friends for new ones, make the other person feel less of a successful person, and never try to hold a friend back from becoming a better person. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining for the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian temple? He tried to tell what is the actual meaning of success in life. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.
Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation, and honor its law! Emerson was a well-known preacher, orator, and writer, as well as the leader of a group of New England intellectuals who became known as the Transcendentalists. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one. In one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men. The other element of friendship is tenderness. Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.
I know not, but I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be. He saw them as a source of strength and support during difficult times. Treat your friend as a spectacle. A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin—peddlers, to the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle, and dinners at the best taverns.
We are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and trifle, but we can scarce believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love. Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts? Without work one finishes nothing. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. He was one of the most influential thinkers of his time, and he was friends with a number of other luminaries.
It makes no difference how many friends I have, and what content I can find in conversing with each, if there be one to whom I am not equal. Almost all people descend to meet. And yet I have one text which I cannot choose but remember. Me too thy nobleness has taught To master my despair; The fountains of my hidden life Are through thy friendship fair. But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it is all over. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited.
It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. I can get politics, and chat, and neighbourly conveniences from cheaper companions. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension are old acquaintances. You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all three of you come together, and you shall not have one new and hearty word. A new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from sleep. I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden.
