Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Words You Should Know to Sound Smart: 1200 Essential Words Every Sophisticated Person Should Be Able to Use
by Bobbi Bly
Published 18 Mar 2009

cache (KASH), noun Something hidden or stored. Everyone was jealous when they learned of Moira’s CACHE of acceptances to the finest schools. caducous (kuh-DOO-kuss), adjective Transitory; short-lived; perishable. “Some thing, which I fancied was a part of me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was CADUCOUS.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet, essayist, and transcendentalist calumny (KAL-um-nee), noun The act of libel or slander; to besmirch a person’s reputation by spreading false statements and rumors. “CALUMNY will sear virtue itself.” –William Shakespeare cannonade (CAN-non-ayd), noun A continuous, relentless bombardment or effort.

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“We all have these places where shy humiliations GAMBOL on sunny afternoons.” – W. H. Auden, Anglo-American poet gamesome (GAYM-suhm), adjective Playful and frolicsome. “[Nature] is GAMESOME and good, / But of mutable mood,— / No dreary repeater now and again, / She will be all things to all men.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet, essayist, and transcendentalist gamine (gah-MEEN), noun A girl with a boyish demeanor and mischievous nature who is somehow still appealing. Her GAMINE behavior and looks only made her that much more attractive to teenage boys her age. gamut (GAM-utt), noun The full spectrum of possibilities or choices.

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“Proponents of GLOBALIZATION insist that, as trade and investment move across borders, economic efficiencies raise the standards of living on both sides of the exchange.” – Arthur Goldwag, American author globule (GLAHB-yewl), noun A small globe or ball. “In yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a GLOBULE of sap ascends.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet, essayist, and transcendentalist Gnosticism (NAH-stih-sih-zim), noun The religious belief that salvation is attained through secret knowledge rather than through prayer, ritual, faith, divine grace, or good works. Many of the key principles of Christianity were formed as a direct response to GNOSTICISM.

Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations
by Garson O'Toole
Published 1 Apr 2017

Many of the examples above conform to the following flexible phrasal template: “X is a journey, not a destination.” Linguists refer to such a phrase as a “snowclone.”16 Notes: Thanks to Jack Herring for his query on this topic. This question was constructed by QI based on his inquiry. Also, thanks to Dan Goncharoff for noting the relevant quotation due to Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Essay II: Experience,” in Essays: Second Series, 2nd ed. (Boston: James Munroe, 1844), 65. Accessed in Google Books, https://goo.gl/gQHb0V. 2. Charles Clay Doyle, Wolfgang Mieder, and Fred R. Shapiro, eds., The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 142.

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The saying appeared on a quotation-filled page titled “Thoughts on the Business of Life” that has appeared in every issue of Forbes for decades.10 In 1980 the president of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, attributed the saying to Ralph Waldo Emerson:11 Cal Poly president Hugh La Bounty said at the awards banquet that some lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson best summed up the Scolinos philosophy and the team performance that exemplified it: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” In 1989 the bestseller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey included the quotation and attributed it to Oliver Wendell Holmes.

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SIMILAR NAMES An ascription can jump from one person to another person who shares a similar name. This mechanism is distinct from alphabetic ambiguity because the mistake is not caused by the misreading of a list of quotations. A gas station attendant with the nickname Socrates has the same name as the famous philosopher Socrates. Harrington Emerson might be confused for Ralph Waldo Emerson; the songwriter Poe could be mistaken for the horror master Edgar Allan Poe. CONCOCTIONS It is difficult to prove that a misquotation or misattribution was forged deliberately. The majority of quotation errors in this book emerged via multifarious accidents. Most of the time, the culprit is only inattentiveness or ineptitude.

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance
by Henry Petroski
Published 2 Jan 1990

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph, Inc., for permission to reprint excerpts from “How the Pencil Is Made” from The Pencil : Its History, Manufacture, and Use by The Koh-I-Noor Pencil Company. Reprinted courtesy of Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph, Inc. Correspondence between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Caroline Sturgis quoted by permission of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association and of the Houghton Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Petroski, Henry. The pencil: a history of design and circumstance/by Henry Petroski. — 1st ed. p. cm. eISBN: 978-0-307-77243-5 1. Pencils—History. I.

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Without it he could not label his blotting paper pressing leaves or his insect boxes holding beetles; without it he could not record the measurements he made; without it he could not write home on the paper he brought; without it he could not make his list. Without a pencil Thoreau would have been lost in the Maine woods. According to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau seems always to have carried, “in his pocket, his diary and pencil.” So why did Thoreau—who had worked with his father to produce the very best lead pencils manufactured in America in the 1840s—neglect to list even one among the essential things to take on an excursion? Perhaps the very object with which he may have been drafting his list was too close to him, too familiar a part of his own everyday outfit, too integral a part of his livelihood, too common a thing for him to think to mention.

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He certainly designed and built his own cabin at Walden, and examples of a more mechanical bent in Thoreau exist in the Concord Free Public Library in his drawings for a barn and stanchion for cows and for a machine designed for making lead pipe. So it certainly seems that the younger Thoreau was not without the talents or inclination to “practice engineering” by working out the details of a solution for a machine to produce finer graphite. According to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s son, Edward, who was a young friend of Thoreau, the solution consisted in having a “narrow churn-like chamber around the mill-stones prolonged some seven feet high, opening into a broad, close, flat box, a sort of shelf. Only lead-dust that was fine enough to rise to that height, carried by an upward draught of air, and lodge in the box was used, and the rest ground over.”

To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction
by Phillip Lopate
Published 12 Feb 2013

How I Became an Emersonian For several months I have been camping out in the mind of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is a companionable, familiar, and yet endlessly stimulating place and, since his mind is stronger than mine, I keep deferring to his wisdom, even his doubts, and quite shamelessly identifying with him. All this started when I idly came across in a local bookstore the new, two-volume edition of his Selected Journals, published by the Library of America, and decided to give it a whirl. Some 1,800 pages later, I am in thrall to, in love with, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. If this sounds homoerotic, so be it. I think of a peculiar passage about love in his journals that says that in embracing the worth of someone he admires, “I become his wife & he again aspires to a higher worth which dwells in another spirit & so is wife or receiver of that spirit’s influence.”

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My profoundest belief as a teacher is that many solutions for would-be literary nonfiction writers can be found in the library. To that end, I have included here a long list of exemplary books old and new. I have also included a series of literary case studies—Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Baldwin, and Edward Hoagland—to explore how nonfiction theory works in practice. Some of these pieces were commissioned or requested; they may have gotten their start as conference talks, contributions to anthologies, even columns for Creative Nonfiction magazine. But they all speak to the same urgent question, of how to write intelligent, satisfying, engaging literary nonfiction.

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Pre-Darwin, he is saying that we still have the instinctual makeup of apes and cavemen. Note, too, the term “prejudice.” Despite the consensus of opprobrium attached to that word today, I take it as a given that personal essayists must examine their prejudices and instinctual aversions as starting points for any honest analysis of their characters and views. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a notebook entry for October 14, 1834, wrote, “Every involuntary repulsion that arises in your mind give heed unto. It is the surface of a central truth.” The “central truth” that Hazlitt explores in the next long (three-page!) paragraph is that hatred seems to provide an essential flavoring, or spice, that we need in order to keep life from becoming intolerably bland.

Self-Reliance and Other Essays
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Published 12 Oct 1993

The Domino Project is powered by Amazon. Sign up for updates and free stuff at www.thedominoproject.com This is the first edition. If you’d like to suggest a riff for a future edition, please visit our website. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803—1882 Self-Reliance / Ralph Waldo Emerson p. cm. ISBN: 978-1-936719-10-5 Self-Reliance RALPH WALDO EMERSON I reread Self-Reliance a few times a year. It’s always on my bedside table and I’ve done it for many years. Emerson’s clear and true words ring like a bell. It keeps me on track. It’s hard to follow your path or even to know what it is. There are constant distractions.

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The Domino Project team consists of Amber Rae, Willie Jackson, Michael Parrish DuDell, Lauryn Ballesteros, Amy Richards, Ishita Gupta, Alex Miles Younger and your host, Seth Godin. Thanks also to the very self-reliant folks in Seattle, including Mary Ellen Fullhart, Sarah Gelman, Terry Goodman, Victoria Griffith, Megan Jacobsen, Galen Maynard, Lynette Mong, Sarah Tomashek, and Alan Turkus. Ralph Waldo Emerson may be long dead, but he’s a role model for many of us (not the dead part, of course). The idea that one can make a living doing work that resonates—spreading ideas that matter—is new again, and we’re glad to highlight him as an example. This book is dedicated to anyone willing to step up and avoid the hobgoblins.

Drinking in America: Our Secret History
by Susan Cheever
Published 12 Oct 2015

This belief, which may have begun with his horror at the way polling places were conducted, led him to favor a strong federal government, and he eventually helped Alexander Hamilton—another man who was disturbed by drunkenness—draft The Federalist Papers. By the 1750s the stage was set for an explosion that would be “the shot heard round the world,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. England was ruled by King George III, who took the British throne during the Seven Years’ War (which included the French and Indian War) over the control of colonial lands in North America, India, Portugal, and other places. In North America, the campaign began with the seizure of a British encampment (later Fort Duquesne) by the French in the disputed Ohio Valley.

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This seems to have been the case for both Ethan Allen, who sauntered into the bedroom of a commandant and ordered him to surrender, and for Paul Revere, who, after being captured by the British, talked them into letting him go and persuaded them that the small, ragged militia waiting for them on Lexington Green was actually a few hundred well-trained and well-armed men. “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and “Concord Hymn” by Ralph Waldo Emerson are both poems that sacrifice the actual facts to the constraints of rhyme and the possibility of entertainment. This is just as well, since liquor figures in both stories. Historical poems by men like Longfellow and Emerson were the movies of the nineteenth century. They were amusing, and a lot more fun than reading dry old history books, but extremely inaccurate and often embellished.

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There are generally two kinds of people in an alcoholic family: the alcoholics who are sloppy, unreliable, infuriating, yet sometimes charming; and the nonalcoholics who in response can become hypercompetent, compulsive, and often furious. They are rarely charming. Rage runs in alcoholic families. Depression and sadness also run deep in families—especially alcoholic families. When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the gloomy misanthropist John Quincy Adams was so difficult and angry that he seemed to have put sulfuric acid in his tea,93 he was describing a classic reaction of the nonalcoholic in an alcoholic family. John Adams himself suffered from sharp spells of melancholy. Although John Adams’s friend and colleague Benjamin Rush, with astonishing prescience, had written that alcoholism was a disease and not a failure of willpower, John and Abigail Adams were baffled by their sons’ alcoholic behavior, by Abigail’s brother William’s behavior, and later by their grandson John Adams’s behavior, which was so heinous that his letters were removed from the family archives.

Flight of the WASP
by Michael Gross

He also wrote for journals in support of pacifism and other progressive causes, and as a critic of scientific quackery; he lectured against phrenology, the study of head shape as an indicator of character and intellectual ability. His intellectual credentials were established through a relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the founders and leaders of the Transcendentalist movement, which flourished in the 1830s, promoting personal freedom and self-reliance. In 1818, Gamaliel’s sister Sarah Alden Bradford had married one of Emerson’s uncles. Emerson considered Gamaliel IV one of his great benefactors. He returned to medicine in 1833 when he was appointed the superintendent of Massachusetts General Hospital.

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According to West, “his departure out of life was so easy as scarcely to be accurately recognized.” But in a more satisfying, if apocryphal, account, his last word was said to be a shriek: “Remorse!” * * * What did Randolph of Roanoke regret? Certainly not his own contradictions, even if he had been willing to admit to them. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay on self-reliance just eight years after Randolph’s death, “A great person does not have to think consistently from one day to the next.” Randolph’s unyielding defense of individual liberty, states’ rights, and the status quo is hard to square with his insistence that his attitude toward slaves—both his own and those held captive by others—was essentially benign.

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In joining the Church of England, he was one of many American Protestants of all other sects, including the Penns, who would become Anglicans and later in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Episcopalians, a process supercharged by the Revolution. E. Digby Baltzell would later quote Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation that “no dissenter rides in his coach for three generations; he invariably falls into the Establishment.”20 Protestant sects in America, Baltzell continued, tended to divide along class lines. Where Quakers led simpler lives, the educated, cultivated elite, who often revered British restraint, dignity, and good taste, if not their colonial policies, flocked to the more socially respectable Anglican and Presbyterian Churches.

The English
by Jeremy Paxman
Published 29 Jan 2013

The fixation with owning their homes is a physical expression of the English belief in privacy. Are the three things – the insularity of the nation as a whole, a collective belief in domesticity and an individual preoccupation with privacy – differing expressions of the same phenomenon? And if so, where did it come from? In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘English Traits’ I came across a meteorological explanation of the Englishman’s character. ‘Born in a harsh and wet climate, which keeps him indoors whenever he is at rest,’ he writes, ‘domesticity is the taproot which enables the nation to branch wide and high. The motive and end of their trade is to guard the independence and privacy of their homes.’9 I wondered whether the English weather might really be the key.

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César de Saussure was so scandalized by the open drunkenness, the ‘mighty swearing’, the shirts-off wrestling (the sight of women taking part particularly shook him) and general licentiousness that he concluded that ‘the lower populace is of brutal and insolent nature, and is very quarrelsome’.12 To add a sense of superiority to this natural coarseness was very dangerous. By Victorian times the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson had noted the way in which the general arrogance of the English towards foreigners expressed itself among many young people: ‘There are multitudes of young rude English who have the self sufficiency and bluntness of their nation, and who, with their disdain for the rest of mankind, and with this indigestion and choler, have made the English traveller a proverb for uncomfortable and offensive manner.’13 Every time that English soccer fans rampage through a city centre, overturning the tables of sidewalk cafés, bloodying the noses of anyone unlucky enough to be in their way, the London press and politicians agonize about what it all means.

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Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power, p. 172. 2. Alexander Kinglake: Eothen, pp. 200–202. 3. Max O’Rell: John Bull and his Island, p. 18. 4. Michael Lewis: ‘Oh, not to be in England’, in the Spectator, 23 May 1992. 5. Hermann Muthesius: The English House, p. xv. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., p. 8. 8. Ibid., p. 9. 9. Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘English Traits’, in Collected Works, Vol. V, pp. 59–60. 10. George Santayana: Soliloquies in England, p. 14. 11. Samuel Johnson: The Idler, No. 11. 12. Bill Bryson: Notes from a Small Island, p. 278. 13. Johnson, op. cit. 14. Prof. C. G. Collier, letter, 29 October 1996. 15. André Maurois: Three Letters on the English, pp. 261–2. 16.

Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire
by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian
Published 1 Nov 2012

Coatsworth, “The Cold War in Central America, 1975–1991,” The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3, p. 221. 4. For further discussion, see Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010). 5. Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Democracy and Education, ed. Carlos P. Otero (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), p. 34. 6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1883), p. 525. 7. For discussion, see Noam Chomsky, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1964). See also Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 8.

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One of your strongest influences was the educator John Dewey, whom you’ve described as “one of the relics of the Enlightenment classical liberal tradition.”5 One of the real achievements of the United States is that it pioneered mass public education, not just elite education for the few and maybe some vocational training, if anything, for the many. The opening of land-grant colleges and general schools in the nineteenth century was a very significant development. But if you look back, the reasons for this were complex. Actually, one of them was discussed by Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was struck by the fact that business elites—he didn’t use that term—were interested in public education. He speculated that the reason was that “you must educate them to keep them from our throats.”6 In other words, the mass of the population is getting more rights, and unless they’re properly educated, they may come after us.

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature
by Ben Tarnoff
Published 20 Mar 2014

Along with William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., they were known as the Fireside Poets: a set of nationally loved northeasterners who wrote frequently for the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly, the country’s most prestigious literary magazine. To King, they provided a gold standard against which the young aspirants of the Far Western frontier could be judged. New England had dominated American letters for decades. In the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson had started an intellectual movement in Massachusetts that molded America’s first generation of literary greats. Emerson and his descendants failed in one major respect, however. They gave the young nation much to be proud of—yet they never quite overcame the postcolonial inferiority complex that, since the Revolution, had kept American writers in thrall to their European elders.

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Harte induced nearly as much swooning at the Saturday Club, a monthly gathering of all the big-name Brahmins. He attended on February 25, 1871, his first full day in town. In an oak-paneled room on the second floor of a Boston hotel, the wizened monuments of American letters lined up to meet him: Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Even Twain would have been intimidated by such company. But if Harte felt the slightest bit starstruck, it didn’t show. On the contrary: he “had a spice of irreverence that enabled him to take them more ironically than they might have liked,” Howells observed.

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Fields, October 29, 1862, HUNT. These weren’t unusual Fireside Poets: James H. Justus, “The Fireside Poets: Hearthside Values and the Language of Care,” in A. Robert Lee, ed., Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (London: Vision Press, 1985), pp. 146–165. New England had dominated “We have listened . . .”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Carl Bode and Malcolm Cowley, eds., The Portable Emerson (New York: Penguin, 1981 [1946]), p. 70. The New York Bohemians “solemn Philistines”: quoted in Roy Kotynek and John Cohassey, American Cultural Rebels, p. 17. In October 1863 Harte’s story was called “The Legend of Monte del Diablo.”

The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms
by Danielle Laporte
Published 16 Apr 2012

ACT THE WAY YOU WANT TO FEEL Five to ten accomplishments or experiences that will make me feel this way: Three things I will do today to generate these feelings: Three things I will do this week to generate these feelings: Three things I will do this quarter to generate these feelings: Three people to collaborate with who help me feel this way: The one who asks questions doesn’t lose his way. —African proverb When we have arrived at the question, the answer is already near. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Often just asking a question put changes in motion. Even if you don’t have the answer, a good question stirs up reality. This is why the master poet Rilke implores us to “Live the questions themselves, live them now!” That starts with asking more questions of one another and ourselves. Ceaselessly. 1.

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Try to appreciate the position that the other person is in. Giving honest criticism is no fun for most people, and it’s often a case of “This is going to hurt me as much as it might hurt you.” There’s a decent chance that your critic fretted over how best to deliver the feedback to you. Consider the source. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, to succeed is “to earn the appreciation of honest critics.” So, first, you need to consider your source and their motivation. If you feel you’re being inaccurately criticized, then you need to say so in no uncertain terms. This is tricky because you may be perceived as being defensive.

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(The answer to this is very rarely “everyone.” There are two ways to approach this: values + lifestyle, and “types” of people.) Who needs what you’ve got? (Even though they may not know it yet.) Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. —Ralph Waldo Emerson If it looks good, you’ll see it. If it sounds good, you’ll hear it. If it’s marketed right, you’ll buy it. But if it’s true, you’ll feel it. —Kid Rock If you’re working in the marketing department of a major blue-chip firm crafting eco-friendly slogans to cover up your toxic waste, or at an ad agency devising sexy images about how cans of liquid sugar are going to make us feel groovy, then give me a minute of your time.

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea
by James Livingston
Published 15 Feb 2016

So its performance created intellectual as well as economic independence, and therefore the possibility of citizenship. If you were independent in this twofold sense, you couldn’t be coerced or duped by the wealthy men who lived off the labor of slaves and serfs. You were your own boss, as we would put it today: you answered to nobody. Centuries later, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Abraham Lincoln spoke this same language. In “Man the Reformer,” a lecture first given at a library founded by mechanics’ apprentices in 1841, Emerson introduced what he called the “doctrine of the Farm.” He sounds like an innocent ancestor of Hannah Arendt, Richard Sennett, or Matthew B.

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.: National Printing Office, 1966), 40. Chapter 2 1. Karl Marx, Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 1:183–84. 2. From a letter to a Russian friend, P. V. Annenkov, in December 28, 1846, appendix to Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 181. 3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “A Lecture Read before the Mechanics’ Apprentices’ Library Association, Boston, January 25, 1841,” in Nature: Addresses and Lectures (Boston: J. Munroe, 1849). Chapter 3 1. Thomas Edsall, “Is the Safety Net Just Masking Tape?,” New York Times, December 17, 2013; italics mine. 2. David Ellerman, “Rethinking Common vs.

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume
by Josh Kaufman
Published 2 Feb 2011

No matter who you are or what you’re trying to do, you’re about to discover a useful new way of looking at business that will help you spend less time fighting your fears and more time doing things that make a difference. You Don’t Need to Know It All As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, ESSAYIST AND POET One of the beautiful things about learning any subject is the fact that you don’t need to know everything—you only need to understand a few critically important concepts that provide most of the value. Once you have a solid scaffold of core principles to work from, building upon your knowledge and making progress becomes much easier.

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Using Leverage is playing with fire—it can be a useful tool if used properly, but it can also burn you severely. Never use Leverage unless you’re fully aware of the consequences and are prepared to accept them. Otherwise, you’re putting your business and personal financial situation at risk. Hierarchy of Funding Money often costs too much. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, ESSAYIST AND POET Imagine you’ve invented an antigravity device that can levitate solid objects without requiring much power. Your invention will revolutionize the transportation and manufacturing industries, making many new products possible. Demand for your invention is a given—all you need to do is create enough devices to fill the demand.

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Understanding how we take in information, how we make decisions, and how we decide what to do or what not to do is critically important if you want to create and sustain a successful business venture. Once you have a clear picture of how the human mind works, it’s easy to find better ways to get things done and work more effectively with others. SHARE THIS CONCEPT: http://book.personalmba.com/human-mind/ Caveman Syndrome Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON Imagine for a moment what it would be like to have lived 100,000 years ago. Your senses are on full alert as you walk along the banks of a river, scanning for food: fish swimming in the stream, edible plants, or animals to catch. The sun is nearing its apex, and you’ve already walked six miles today—your callused feet will take you six miles more before the day is done.

The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community
by Ray Oldenburg
Published 17 Aug 1999

Atkin, “A Designed Locale for Laughter to Reinforce Community Bonds,” in Chapman and Foot, Ibid. 15. Georg Simmel, in On Individual and Social Form, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971). 16. George Malko, “The Biltmore for Men Only,” Holiday Magazine (January 1969), 16. 17. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Friendship,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Journals (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1968), 161. 18. See the discussion of neutral ground in Chapter 2. 19. Harry Carmichael, Most Deadly Hate (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1974). 20. Thomas S. Langner and Stanley T. Michael, Life Stress and Mental Health (New York: The Free Press of Clencoe, 1963), 284–287. 21.

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Levine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), Chapter 9. 10. Richard West, “The Power of 21,” New York (5 October 1981), 33. 11. Michael Daly, “Break Point,” New York (5 October 1981), 45. 12. Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), Chapter 11. 13. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Journals (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 158. 14. Richard Goodwin, “The American Condition,” The New Yorker (28 January 1974), 36. 15. William Wordsworth, “The Art of Conversation,” in Wordsworthian and Other Studies, ed. Ernest de Selincourt. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 181–206. 16.

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Henry Sedgwick, The Art of Happiness (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1930), Chapter 17. 18. Brian Jackson, Working Class Community (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), Chapter 4. 19. “The English Department,” Playground Daily News (25 November 1982). 20. John Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1967 Reprint), 214–215. 21. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Uncollected Lectures (New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1932), 36. 22. Op. cit. 23. Laurence Wylie, Village in the Vaucluse (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), Chapter 11. 24. Op. cit. 25. Op. cit. 26. Henry Miller, Remember to Remember (London: The Grey Walls Press, 1952), 12. 27. Elijah Anderson, A Place on the Corner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976). 28.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language
by Robert McCrum
Published 24 May 2010

If you can see where the roots of global English and its predominantly American culture are planted, how and why they evolved and what contributed to its special character, you might feel more confident about the world we are in, and be at peace with it. 5 Writing merely of the English language, the celebrated American critic Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that it was ‘the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven’. In the new millennium English and the numberless manifestations of its culture surround us like a sea; and like the waters of the deep, it is full of mysteries. Why do some Germans idolize Shakespeare? How did a soccer trophy sponsor peace among warring factions in Iraq?

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In the eighth century as much as the fifth, an island with the promise of minerals would always be attractive to invaders. For the next three hundred years the English experienced another foreign occupation in which their culture would be forced to adapt or face annihilation. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Mixture is a secret of the English island.’ This time, the enemy from the sea was symbolic of a wider European phenomenon. 5 The mass movement of the Scandinavian peoples between the years 750 and 1050, one of the great migrations of European history, began as seasonal plunder-raids and ended as conquest and settlement.

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This inculcation of Standard American English was an early consequence of independence, and culturally for the American people every bit as important. 5 Noah Webster’s was just one practical response to the challenge of independence. Throughout American society the idea of radical innovation was expressed in all manner of ways, both homespun and high-flown. The mood of can-do enthusiasm reached up even as far as the great American critic, the ‘Transcendentalist’ Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, in his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard University of 1837, defined the American way as a ceaseless quest for originality as well as for a liberation from the burden of the past, especially in its European manifestations. The American scholar, Emerson declared, ‘plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation … He is one who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts.

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World
by James Miller
Published 17 Sep 2018

,” Commentary, September 1, 1948, www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-herd-of-independent-mindshas-the-avant-garde-its-own-mass-culture. “I do not wish to expiate but to live”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 263, 262. “a new degree of culture”: Emerson, “Circles,” ibid., 408. “Some fetish of a government”: Emerson, “The American Scholar,” ibid., 64. “make the gallows as glorious as the cross”: See James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1888), 2:597. When the self-reliant Emersonian: Cf. Henry David Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems (New York: Library of America, 2001), 396–421.

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Because they were more attuned to the psychic discords of American national identity, the producers of America’s demotic culture were able to play a leading role in articulating conflicting desires, fears, and dreams that were barely expressible in the realm of electoral politics. Consider, for example, the paradoxical convergence in antebellum America of popular interest in the northern states in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the minstrel show—a cultural convergence that helped set the stage for the Civil War and the subsequent abolition of slavery. Emerson became the architect of a popular philosophy for the new nation by lecturing on the Lyceum circuit of organizations that sponsored public events meant to promote “the universal diffusion of knowledge” to the general public.

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A COMMERCIAL REPUBLIC OF FREE INDIVIDUALS American distrust of popular passions; the tempering influence of commerce in eighteenth-century America ||| 1776: Thomas Paine, Common Sense, and the Declaration of Independence ||| the ambiguous place of democracy in America during the revolutionary era ||| modern democracy from France to America: the democratic-republican societies of the 1790s ||| the American dream of a commercial democracy ||| America’s first great demagogue, Andrew Jackson ||| Tocqueville celebrates the Fourth of July in Albany, New York, 1831 ||| Tocqueville on democracy as an egalitarian form of life ||| the strange insurrection over the right to vote in Rhode Island, 1842 ||| Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the American struggle over the franchise ||| demotic culture in America: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, minstrelsy ||| Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas and the fantasy of a democracy still to come FOUR. A STRUGGLE FOR POLITICAL AND SOCIAL EQUALITY The Chartists and the London Democratic Association; the first Chartist Convention and first Chartist petition, 1839 ||| Karl Marx’s ambivalence about democracy; communism as the realization of individual freedom and social equality ||| conflict as the paradoxical essence of nascent modern democratic societies ||| Mazzini and his democratic faith in cosmopolitan nationalism ||| the Paris Commune of 1871 ||| the Commune as revolutionary icon ||| the rise of mass political parties; the case of the German Social Democratic Party ||| the Russian general strike of 1905 and the St.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer
by Meadows. Donella and Diana Wright
Published 3 Dec 2008

Those are just a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our current culture, all of which have utterly dumbfounded other cultures, who thought them not the least bit obvious. Paradigms are the sources of systems. From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows, and everything else about systems. No one has ever said that better than Ralph Waldo Emerson: Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to . . . their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers.

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Observe the ideas of the present day . . . see how timber, brick, lime, and stone have flown into convenient shape, obedient to the master idea reigning in the minds of many persons. . . . It follows, of course, that the least enlargement of ideas . . . would cause the most striking changes of external things.7 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The ancient Egyptians built pyramids because they believed in an afterlife. We build skyscrapers because we believe that space in downtown cities is enormously valuable. Whether it was Copernicus and Kepler showing that the earth is not the center of the universe, or Einstein hypothesizing that matter and energy are interchangeable, or Adam Smith postulating that the selfish actions of individual players in markets wonderfully accumulate to the common good, people who have managed to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm have hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems.

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Thanks to David Holmstrom of Santiago, Chile. 5. For an example, see Dennis Meadows’s model of commodity price fluctuations: Dennis L. Meadows, Dynamics of Commodity Production Cycles (Cambridge, MA: Wright-Allen Press, Inc., 1970). 6. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967). 7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “War,” lecture delivered in Boston, March, 1838. Reprinted in Emerson’s Complete Works, vol. XI, (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1887), 177. 8. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). Chapter Seven 1. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1927). 2.

Boston Like a Local
by Dk Eyewitness

Among its previous owners was Charlie Gibson, Jr., a member of the city’s once-hidden gay community. If you’re there on the first Thursday of the month, join one of the tours that focuses on Boston’s gay subculture around the 1900s – a tribute to Charlie. g ARTS & CULTURE g Contents Literary Locations Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe – these literary greats have all called Boston home. Bookish haunts hark back to their glory days, while historic libraries lure in new readers. g ARTS & CULTURE g Contents Literary Locations PINCKNEY STREET EDGAR ALLAN POE STATUE THE PRINTING OFFICE OF EDES & GILL GRAVE OF E.

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This center offers a wide range of tutorials on things like novel- and playwriting. g Literary Locations g Contents Google Map RUINS OF SCHOOLMASTER HILL Map 5; Franklin Park, 1 Franklin Park Road, Roxbury; ///lion.grape.models Found in leafy Franklin Park, this small rise was once home to writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. He lived in a cabin here for two years while working as a schoolmaster (hence the hill’s name). Though the house itself is gone, you can still wander through the ruins and soak up the natural beauty that inspired his work. g Literary Locations g Contents Google Map BOSTON ATHENAEUM Map 1; 10½ Beacon Street, Beacon Hill; ///alarm.drips.august; www.bostonathenaeum.org Dating back to 1807, this members-only library is home to over half a million books, artworks, and artifacts, including a collection of items from the American Civil War.

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man
by Luke Harding
Published 7 Feb 2014

But during that momentous summer he radiated a sense of tranquility and equanimity. He had reached a rock-like place of inner certainty. Here, nothing could touch him. 1 TheTrueHOOHA Ellicott City, near Baltimore December 2001 ‘Nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of one’s own mind.’ RALPH WALDO EMERSON, ‘Self-Reliance’, Essays: First Series In late December 2001, someone calling themselves ‘TheTrueHOOHA’ had a question. TheTrueHOOHA was an 18-year-old American male, an avid gamer, with impressive IT skills and a sharp intelligence. His real identity was unknown. But then everyone who posted on Ars Technica, a popular technology website, did so anonymously.

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Lon was an officer in the US coast guard; Snowden spent his early years in Elizabeth City, along North Carolina’s coast, where the coast guard has its biggest air and naval base. He has an older sister, Jessica. Like other members of the US forces, Snowden Snr has strong patriotic views. He is a conservative. And a libertarian. But he is also a thoughtful conservative. Snowden’s father is articulate, well-read and quotes the works of the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, who advocated a man adhering to his own principles against the dictates of a corrupt state. On joining the coast guard, Lon Snowden swore an oath to uphold the US constitution and the Bill of Rights. He meant it. For him the oath was not just a series of empty phrases: it underpinned the solemn American contract between a citizen and the state.

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A creative body of work stretching back over several years, it includes dozens of photos of herself, and some of her E. ‘To delete or not to delete?’ she tweets. She doesn’t delete. 3 THE SOURCE Gavea, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil December 2012 ‘Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.’ RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Self-reliance and Other Essays From the top of Sugar Loaf Mountain, the city of Rio de Janeiro appears as a precipitous swirl of greens and browns. In the sky, black vultures turn in slow spirals. Below – far below – is downtown and a shimmer of skyscrapers. Fringing it are beaches and breakers frothing endlessly on a turquoise sea.

On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense
by David Brooks
Published 2 Jun 2004

The result is that idealists, the Cosmic Brunettes, tend to withdraw and feel themselves alienated from mainstream American life. Thoreau’s companions purified themselves of the materialism and ambition of the world. They either retreated literally, as he did (very briefly) into the forest; opted for a life shorn of luxuries and frantic getting and spending; or they ascended intellectually, as Ralph Waldo Emerson did at one point in his life, onto the Olympus of high ideals and moral abstractions. “It is a sign of the times,” Emerson observed, that “many intellectual and religious persons withdrew” from “the market and the caucus”—capitalism and politics—to find something “worthy to do.” They looked at life as it was actually lived, with corrupt politicians, growing and greedy businesses, and vulgar mass culture, and they were prone to fits of despair.

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If little Sarah doesn’t develop the right work habits, what sort of life will she have? The future is lurking just ahead, making its demands. Parents are perpetually bouncing on the horns of the dilemma, making little guilty jokes about the amount of therapy their kids will someday need to correct for vague errors made in the character-molding years. In 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal, “I wish to have rural strength and religion for my children, and I wish city facility and polish. I find with chagrin that I cannot have both.” Today many parents wish spontaneity, eccentricity, and imagination for their kids, and also industriousness, self-discipline, and success.

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They already have fulfilling low-risk opportunities in front of them. They can go to law school, med school, or a prestigious investment bank. Here, it is the fantastical visions of the vulgarians that constantly amaze. It’s the dreams of the uncultivated—the Donald Trumps, the Don Kings, the Henry Fords. As Ralph Waldo Emerson taught, in America everyone is average and extraordinary at the same time, a democrat and also a king, a regular schmo and also a new Adam, ready to strike out. When raw immigrants come to the United States, it is their fantasies about the future that have lured them. New York, the city of dreams, inspired wonder for generations of semiliterate immigrants.

What’s Your Type?
by Merve Emre
Published 16 Aug 2018

“Fortunate are they”: Joseph Jastrow, Plotting Your Life: The Psychologist as Helmsman (New York: Greenberg, 1930), 361. In 1734: Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (Philadelphia: McCarty and Davis, 1821), 17. In 1750: Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2007), 58. In 1831: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 75. “A new idea”: Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 113. She asked him to clarify: Katharine Briggs to C. G. Jung, August 23, 1927, Hs 1056:1083, C. G. Jung Papers Collection, ETH-Bibliothek (Zurich, Switzerland).

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In 1734, Alexander Pope had started his poem “An Essay on Man” with the command “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, / The proper study of mankind is Man.” In 1750, Benjamin Franklin, one of Katharine’s heroes, had quipped, “There are three Things extremely hard, Steel, a Diamond, and to know one’s self.” In 1831, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet whose work had inspired William James’s theory of a personal religion, urged each person to “know thyself” so that he might find the “God in thee.” Katharine’s article was just the most recent node in a long intellectual tradition that stretched across the Atlantic and back. But in the pages of the New Republic, the idea of meeting yourself was presented in a tone of definitive, cheerful accessibility that made the journey to self-discovery seem accessible—fun, even.

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It took only three days on Lake Zurich for Murray to diagnose Jung’s “cathexis for women”: his “adoration, adulation” of his female patients and the female sex more generally. Nevertheless, he took Jung’s advice and decided to take his life into his own hands. He and Christiana Morgan became lovers, and together they reread Jung and Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, and discussed how they could make Jung’s language of the self the cornerstone of modern personality psychology. “To go on with what Jung has begun would be the biggest thing that could be done at the present time. Is there a bigger whale or whiter whale than the chains of the outworn attitude which fetter and hinder the spirit?”

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less
by Emrys Westacott
Published 14 Apr 2016

For research supporting the general idea that becoming accustomed to something as the norm interferes with our ability to derive enjoyment from lesser versions of that sort of thing, see Christopher Hsee, Reid Hastie, and Jinquin Chen, “Hedonomics: Bridging Decision Research with Happiness Research,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3, no. 3 (2008): 224–43. 47. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 78. 48. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, III, p. 28. 49. Ibid., p. 27. 50. Seneca, “Consolation of Helva,” in The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca, p. 117. 51. Epicurus, “Fragments,” in The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, p. 51. 52.

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As Wordsworth succinctly put it: One impulse from a vernal wood Can teach you more of man, Of moral evil, and of good, Than all the sages can.12 But probably the best-known modern example of an individual choosing to live in rustic simplicity, away from the artificiality and sophistication of urban society (and its accompanying expenses), in order to be closer to nature is Henry David Thoreau. In 1845 Thoreau built a small cabin on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson close to Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts, and lived there for a little over two years. The literary fruit of this experiment in living was Walden; or, Life in the Woods, a strange combination in one book of memoir, naturalist observations, philosophical reflections, and social commentary.

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream
by Alissa Quart
Published 14 Mar 2023

Lifting up one another should never be considered weakness. Leaning on one another almost always makes us stronger. OceanofPDF.com 2 Where’s Walden? It is the age of the first person singular. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON THE PEBBLY SHORE thrummed with people: a medley of humanity. It was January 2020, before the pandemic made such a thing lethal, on Walden Pond. I was close to the homes of two patron saints of self-reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his best friend, Henry David Thoreau. The two were famous Transcendentalists, that literary and philosophical school of thought that helped define the middle of the nineteenth century.

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Schreiner Jr.’s book The Concord Quartet: Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and the Friendship That Freed the American Mind (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006). “suddenly well and strong . . . [Thoreau is] as full of buds of promise as a young apple tree”: This letter from Emerson is reprinted in Jeffrey S. Cramer, Solid Seasons: The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2019). He inherited $11,600 in 1834: From Albert J. von Frank’s An Emerson Chronology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1994), 91. Emerson’s second wife, Lidian: This detail is from the fine and Emerson-loving biography by Richard D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1995).

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 22 Oct 2018

Google, the world’s most sought-after employer Katie Little and Denise Garcia, “The 40 Most Attractive Employers in America, According to LinkedIn,” CNBC, June 20, 2016, http://www.cnbc.com/​2016/​06/​19/​the-40-most-attractive-employers-in-america-according-to-linkedin.html. seeing only the price of fish Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Sully and Kleinteich), 9:9. “strut about so many walking monsters” This from Emerson’s lecture “The American Scholar,” delivered to a class at Harvard College in 1837; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and English Traits (New York: P. F. Collier, 1909). digital fabrication will be “so powerful” Stephanie Shipp et al., Emerging Global Trends in Advanced Manufacturing, IDA Paper P-4603 (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analysis, 2012).

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So this is punk manufacturing. Suddenly, thanks to cheap hardware, cheap software, and the Internet, all of us can make stuff. If this movement launches a slew of small businesses like mine, I think it will have an impact every bit as great as the Internet.” The nineteeth-century philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once famously spoke out against the strictly utilitarian criteria of value, whereby one was judged not by one’s character but by one’s productivity, which he compared to gazing into the ocean and seeing only the price of fish. His insight was that the emerging corporation and its factory system had atomized work and robbed workers of their humanity.

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller
by Alec Nevala-Lee
Published 1 Aug 2022

“the physical resources”: RBF, “Margaret Fuller’s Prophecy,” in BFR, 41. “I accept the universe”: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; New York: Modern Library, 1994), 47. “I must start with the universe”: AMS, 12. “Chiefly the seashore”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Civilization.” “The line of beauty”: Ibid., “Beauty.” “Swedenborg approximated”: Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 297. “The genius which”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Swedenborg,” Representative Men. “This man, who appeared”: Ibid. “a freak”: Samuel Rosenberg, The Confessions of a Trivialist (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972), 76. RBF recalled discussing Sidis with the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, another former prodigy of the same era at Harvard (Amy Wallace, The Prodigy [New York: E.

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One of her listeners recalled, “I felt that the whole wealth of the universe was open to me.” The allegorical frontispiece to Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). Public domain Margaret Fuller became known as the most widely read person in New England, and she had a tumultuous friendship with the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, to whom she said, “I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.” Emerson was “astonished and repelled,” but he granted that she was the country’s finest conversationalist. Nathaniel Hawthorne, by contrast, had reservations: “It was such an awful joke,” said the author of The Scarlet Letter, “that she should have resolved—in all sincerity, no doubt—to make herself the greatest, wisest, best woman of the age.”

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At his facility in Tomales Bay, California, Dederich oversaw the Game, a form of group therapy based on verbal abuse, and punished members for infractions by ordering them to shave their heads. Dederich also used tensegrity models to represent a perfect society built on “vectors and valences,” as the residents spent hours “gluing their fingers into tortured geometrical configurations,” and Fuller himself was praised as a great thinker on the level of Lao-tzu and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1968 a writer named David Cole Gordon had urged Fuller to pay a visit to Synanon. “Chuck has installed a hobby-size workshop on one end of the large table he uses for a desk,” Gordon wrote, “and is building tensegrity systems and coming to grips with your geometry.” Fuller agreed to tour the center, where he was impressed by how its use of dance “allowed for individual expression while cultivating a group consciousness.”

Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone
by Eric Klinenberg
Published 1 Jan 2012

“Expressive individualism,” as exemplified by Walt Whitman, advocates cultivating and “celebrating” the self (as the poet put it in the first line of the first edition of Leaves of Grass). This view has inspired America’s ongoing search for identity and meaning. Though these two strains of individualism promote different values and agendas, together they offer Americans a well of cultural resources for putting the self before society. We draw from them often. Consider Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of America’s first public intellectuals. In his powerful essay “Self-Reliance,” Emerson warned that “society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members,” and he offered advice for those seeking relief: “Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”12 Emerson’s neighbor Henry David Thoreau made the case for self-reliance in more dramatic fashion, moving into a cabin he built near Walden Pond.

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On their prevalence, see Euromonitor International, “Single Living: How Atomisation—The Rise of Singles and One-Person Households—Is Affecting Consumer Purchasing Habits,” 2008. 11. The statistics on living alone are from the 2006–2008 American Community Survey Three-Year Estimates, published by the U.S. Census Bureau. 12. See Harold Bloom, Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Chelsea House, 1985); David Potter, “American Individualism in the Twentieth Century,” in Ronald Gross and Paul Osterman (eds.), Individualism: Man in Modern Society (New York: Dell, 1971). On Franklin as the “quintessential American,” see Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007 [1981]). 13.

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Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007 [1981]. Belle, Deborah. “Gender Differences in Children’s Social Networks and Supports,” in Deborah Belle (ed.), Children’s Networks and Social Supports, pp. 173–90. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 1989. Bloom, Harold. Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. Borgegård, Lars-Erik, and Jim Kemeny. “Sweden: High-Rise Housing for a Low-Density Country,” in Richard Turkington, Ronald van Kempen, and F. Wassenberg (eds.), High-Rise Housing in Europe: Current Trends and Future Prospects, pp. 31–48. Delft, Netherlands: Delft University Press, 2004.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 14 Jun 2017

I knew from then on that I could have the courage to fail on my own terms. From that moment, I decided that if I was going to succeed or fail, it was going to be up to me. I was changed forever. If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and why? “God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson I love this quote because it is all about defeating fear. Every great and extraordinary accomplishment in this world was done through courage. Hell, you don’t even get to be born unless your mother has the courage to have you. I repeat this phrase when I’m anxious or nervous about something.

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Are there any quotes you think of often or live your life by? I have a few of them: “To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children . . . to leave the world a bit better . . . to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson “Some men see things as they are and say ‘why?’ I dream of things that never were and say ‘why not?’”—Robert Kennedy “Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another: ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’”—C. S. Lewis “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case you fail by default.”

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–John Ruskin Victorian polymath, art critic, philanthropist, and social thinker “As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson American essayist, leader of the 19th-century transcendentalist movement “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
by Nicholas A. Christakis
Published 26 Mar 2019

The urge to rebuild a nation that had yet to celebrate even one centenary became almost a fetish among some philosophers, writers, and clergy even as they worried that their idealism might be seen as all talk and no action. “We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform,” wrote Thoreau’s friend, transcendental philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 1840, and “not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.”17 Many experiments were attempted in Emerson’s neighborhood, most notably the famous effort at Brook Farm. Brook Farm The utopian community of Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, was typical of its time.

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Children addressed their teacher Sophia Ripley by her first name, and as Blair recollected, “She seemed to permeate her pupils with a joyous confidence in their individual ability to tread the path so clearly and pleasantly indicated by her.”29 Most profoundly, the children were seen as having an absolute right to education—“not doled out to him as though he was a pupil of orphan asylums and almshouses—not as the cold benefice and bounty of the world—but as his right—a right conferred upon him by the very fact that he is born into this world a human being.”30 Unlike other utopian experiments in the nineteenth century, Brook Farm did not require participants to abandon their nuclear families or sever all ties with the outside world, so the happenings at Brook Farm were breathlessly reported in the popular press of the time. One Farmer would later note that “there were thousands who looked upon us as little less than heathens, who had returned to a state of semi-barbarism.”31 Many of the leading lights of the transcendentalist movement, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Theodore Parker, passed through the commune. Early feminist and writer Margaret Fuller was also a frequent visitor and resident. Frederick Pratt recalled “the jolly time we children had together, and the use made of our boys’ wheelbarrows or wagons in carrying the girls about; 15 or 18 years afterwards, my brother John married Annie Alcott.

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Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss observed that binary opposition (male/female, good/evil, hot/cold, conservative/liberal, human/animal, body/soul, nature/nurture, and so forth) is one of the simplest and most widespread ways that humans come to terms with complexities in the natural world.85 Unsurprisingly, this tendency to categorize is also applied to social life, demarcating the difference between us and them, between friend and foe. Friendship is a fundamental category, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was onto something when he said, “A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature.”86 Yet scientists have tended to neglect the role friends have played in the life of our species. An extreme focus on kinship and marriage has obscured the more numerous relationships people have with unrelated friends.

The Art of Travel
by Alain de Botton
Published 19 Nov 2008

Humboldt was to be away from Europe for five years. On his return, he settled in Paris and over the next twenty years published a thirty-volume account of his travels, entitled Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. The length of the work was an accurate measure of Humboldt's achievements. Surveying these, Ralph Waldo Emerson was to write, ‘Humboldt was one of those wonders of the world, like Aristotle, like Julius Caesar, like the Admirable Crichton, who appear from time to time as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind, the force and range of the faculties—a universal man.' Much about South America was still unknown to Europe when Humboldt set sail from La Coruna: Vespucci and Bougainville had travelled around the shores of the continent, and La Condamine and Bouguer had surveyed the streams and mountains of the Amazon and of Peru, but there were still no accurate maps of the region, and little information had been gathered on its geology, botany and indigenous peoples.

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Thomas Gray, Letters (1739): ‘There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief without the help of any other argument' Thomas Cole, ‘Essay on American Scenery' (1835): Amid those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, the associations are of God the creator—they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.' Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature' (1836): ‘The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.' It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane. It is as if these landscapes allowed travellers to experience transcendent feelings that they no longer felt in cities and the cultivated countryside.

Who Rules the World?
by Noam Chomsky

Desmond King, “America’s Hidden Government: The Costs of a Submerged State,” review of The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy, by Suzanne Mettler, in Foreign Affairs 91, no. 3 (May/June 2012). 18. Robert W. McChesney, “Public Scholarship and the Communications Policy Agenda,” in … And Communications for All: A Policy Agenda for a New Administration, ed. Amit M. Schejter (New York: Lexington Books, 2009), 50. 19. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: In Two Volumes (Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Company, 1870). 20. Michael Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuke, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975), http://www.trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf. 21.

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American commercial advertising deeply impressed others; Joseph Goebbels admired it and adapted it to Nazi propaganda, all too successfully.18 The Bolshevik leaders tried as well, but their efforts were clumsy and ineffective. A primary domestic task has always been “to keep [the public] from our throats,” as essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson described the concerns of political leaders when the threat of democracy was becoming harder to suppress in the mid-nineteenth century.19 More recently, the activism of the 1960s elicited elite concerns about “excessive democracy” and calls for measures to impose “more moderation” in democracy.

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
by Joshua B. Freeman
Published 27 Feb 2018

Evans, 1833), 19. 57.Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness, 165; Emerson quoted in Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, 124–25. Earlier, Emerson had hailed manufacturing for freeing New England from the need to farm under uncongenial conditions: “Where they have sun, let them plant; we who have it not, will drive our pens and water-wheels.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson, and Waldo Emerson Forbes, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson with Annotations, vol. IV (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 209. 58.Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 115–18. 59.As late as 1853, there were over 1,800 children under fifteen working in Rhode Island manufacturing establishments, including 621 between ages nine and twelve and 59 under the age of nine.

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When the growth of Lowell and the planning of Lawrence presented the possibility that companies on the Merrimack would run out of water power, instead of installing steam engines the mill owners bought real estate and water privileges at the outlet of Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, over sixty miles away, to direct more water into the river (outraging Ralph Waldo Emerson for what he saw as arrogance).28 The corporate arrangements adopted by the Boston textile investors allowed expansion on a scale unprecedented for manufacturing. In 1850, the mills they controlled accounted for about a fifth of all the cotton spinning in the United States. In Lowell alone, in 1857 the ten mill companies, the Lowell Bleachery, and the Lowell Machine Shop (spun off from Canals and Locks) together employed over thirteen thousand workers.29 But the Lowell model did not take full advantage of potential efficiencies that came with size.

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But for Luther, “if a cotton mill is a ‘paradise,’ it is ‘Paradise Lost,’” a site of unhealthy long hours, poorly paid workers, and tyrannical overseers.56 Critics of New England mill conditions, unlike in England, rarely claimed that factory conditions were as bad as or worse than slavery. Ralph Waldo Emerson was something of an exception when, in a bitter commentary on Lowell, he equated black slaves in the South with female mill worker “slaves” and criticized mill owners for wanting to live in luxury without working, “enjoyment without the sweat.”57 But critics still turned to slavery for metaphors of oppression.

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work
by Iain Gately
Published 6 Nov 2014

Early American commuters were required to brave spiritual as well as physical dangers. The Transcendentalists, whose mixture of romanticism and metaphysics became fashionable in the glory decades of railroad building, reckoned train travel was bad for the soul. Their opposition to it was all the more bitter because they’d celebrated it in its infancy. When Ralph Waldo Emerson tried to pin down the zeitgeist in his seminal 1844 lecture on the ‘Young American’, he declared that the railroads had given his subjects an ‘increased acquaintance… with the boundless resources of their own soil’; had annihilated time and converted the country into a wonderland, for railroad iron was ‘a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water’.

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Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Oxford, University Press, 1985, p. 48. 68 ‘A man is not a whole and complete man’, Walt Whitman, quoted in Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, p. 50. 68 ‘in the morning there is one incessant stream of people’, Whitman, quoted in Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, p. 28. 68 ‘Property is continually tending from our city to escape’, New York Tribune 21 January 1847, quoted in Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, p. 28. 70 ‘on, on, on – tears the mad dragon’, Charles Dickens, American Notes For General Circulation, 1842, from Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/675/675-h/675-h.htm. 70 ‘and the train had gone but a few miles when a “snakehead”’, Anthony J. Bianculli, Trains and Technology: The American Railroad in the Nineteenth Century: Track and Structures, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2003, p. 88. 71 ‘Things are in the saddle / And ride mankind’, from ‘Ode to William H. Channing’ in The Early Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, New York, and Boston, Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, 1899. 71 ‘five times a day, I can be whirled to Boston within an hour’, Henry David Thoreau, quoted in Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy, p. 190. 71 ‘the main distinction between which’, Dickens, American Notes. 71 ‘well stuffed, and covered with a fine plush,’ quoted in John H.

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J., Exploring the Urban Past: Essays in Urban History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982. Eden, Emily, The Semi-detached House, London, Richard Bentley, 1859. Emerson, George Rose, London: How the Great City Grew, London, 1862. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, ‘Ode to William H. Channing’, The Early Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, New York and Boston, Thomas Y. Crowell & Company 1899. Engel, Matthew, Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain, London, Pan, 2010. Farmer, Richard, Troy Tranah, Ian O’Donnell, and Jose Catalan, ‘Railway suicide: the psychological effects on drivers’. Psychological Medicine, Vol.22, no.2, 1992.

How the Post Office Created America: A History
by Winifred Gallagher
Published 7 Jan 2016

Then, in 1863, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair had simplified the pricing system by categorizing the mail into first-class letters, second-class publications such as newspapers and magazines, and third-class advertisements, hardcover books, and other miscellaneous printed matter. By 1870, Ralph Waldo Emerson could laud the post for its “educating energy augmented by cheapness, and guarded by a certain religious sentiment in mankind, so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea, over land, and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civilization.”

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“Express companies extend their business”: Harper’s Weekly, December 7, 1889. “The effect of such a law”: C. A. Hutsinpillar, “The Parcels Post” (1904), in John, American Postal Network, vol. 4, p. 262. “our great cooperative express company”: James L. Cowles, “A United States Parcels Post,” in ibid., p. 236. “educating energy augmented by cheapness”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1870), p. 26. “so trashy and wishy-washy”: James Britt, “Second Class Mail Matter: Its Uses and Abuses” (1911), in John, American Postal Network, vol. 4, p. 470. “As long as the people”: Wilmer Atkinson, “Guessing and Figuring Having Failed, Try a Few Ounces of Common Sense” (1911), in John, American Postal Network, vol. 4, p. 455.

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“Comstockery is the world’s standing joke”: George Bernard Shaw, Letter to the Editor, New York Times, September 26, 1905, p. 1. an “Irish smut dealer”: “Who’s Bernard Shaw? Asks Mr. Comstock,” New York Times, September 28, 1905, p. 9. “Shall the right to mail service”: Louis Post, “Our Despotic Postal Censorship,” in John, American Postal Network, vol. 1, p. 407. “Good men must not obey the laws”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Politics,” Essays: Second Series (Boston: James Munroe, 1844). Quoted in https://emersoncentral.com/politics.htm. If there’s a physical symbol of what the combination of the post at its peak: The Farley Post Office continues to play an important role in the preservation of New York City’s historic buildings.

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists
by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
Published 10 Mar 2009

“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but rough his toil be sowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till . . . Your goodness must have some edge to it—else it is none . . . Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Random House, 2000), 133, 135, 139. [back] 37. “Become who you are!” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2005). [back] 38. Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968, 1999), 149–234.

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“Minimum Wage Facts at a Glance.” Fact sheet. Accessible at www.epinet.org/content.cfm/issueguides_minwage_minwagefacts. Economist. “Selling Hot Air.” September 9, 2006. Eliot, T. S. “Quartet No. 1: Burnt Norton.” In Four Quartets. 1943. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” In The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Brooks Atkinson. New York: Random House, 2000. Environics Research Group. “Socio-Cultural Trends: 3SC 1992–2004.” Environmental Protection Agency Office of Transportation and Air Quality. “Light-Duty Automotive Technology and Fuel Economy Trends, 1975 through 2006.” Fact sheet.

The Wordy Shipmates
by Sarah Vowell
Published 30 Sep 2008

Finally, Reyce tries to dissuade Winthrop with the wilderness’s shocking lack of reading material, carping, “How hard will it be for one brought up among books and learned men, to live in a barbarous place, where is no learning and less civility?” Not so hard, it turns out. Winthrop and his shipmates and their children and their children’s children just wrote their own books and pretty much kept their noses in them up until the day God created the Red Sox. One of the Puritans’ descendants, Ralph Waldo Emerson of Concord, embodied the wordy tradition passed down to him when he announced, “The art of writing is the highest of those permitted to man.” As the twentieth-century critic F. O. Mat thiessen would complain of Emerson’s bookish bent, “It can remind you of the bias of provincial New England, whose higher culture had been so exclusively one of books that it had grown incapable even of appraising the worth of other modes of expression.”

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Hutchinson, still swooning, spiritually speaking, for Cotton, nevertheless starts departing from her mentor’s lectures and lets rip her own opinions and beliefs. One person keeping an eye on her, both theologically and literally, is John Winthrop, who lives across the street. (The site of her home would later house Ticknor and Fields, the famous book publisher of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and, appropriately, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, in The Scarlet Letter’s first chapter, misspells her first name but nevertheless honors Hutchinson by describing a rose bush in bloom said to have “sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison door” and symbolizing “some sweet moral blossom.”

Retire Before Mom and Dad
by Rob Berger
Published 10 Aug 2019

To determine how long it will take us to reach Level 7, all we need are our Saving Rate, Investment Return, and Withdrawal Rate. Our time to Level 7 is very sensitive to changes in our Investment Returns and Withdrawal Rate assumption. Video: https://www.retirebeforemomanddad.com/Chapter11 Chapter 12 Level 7 & Saving Rate “Money often costs too much.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson The beautiful thing about the Money Multiplier is that small changes can have a big effect on your journey to Level 7. And big changes can have a huge effect. Let’s first look at some big changes. Then we’ll turn to small changes. Big Changes to Saving Rate So far, we’ve assumed the following: Annual Income: $75,000 Saving Rate: 20% ($15,000 a year) Spending Rate: 80% ($60,000 a year) We know that it will take about 31 years to reach Level 7 Financial Freedom assuming a 6.3% after inflation investment return.

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Changing our habits will be painful at first. Over time, however, we may find that changes that at first seemed like a sacrifice actually saved us money and made our lives more enjoyable. Chapter 17 What if? “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson I love the game of chess—but not the occasional game with a friend. I’m talking about tournament chess with clocks and everything. I have a library filled with chess books, chess playing software, online subscriptions to chess sites, and even chess databases. Chess can be devilishly deceiving.

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
by Christopher Lasch
Published 16 Sep 1991

For Edwards, ingratitude—the refusal to acknowledge limits on human powers, the wish to achieve godlike knowledge and capacities—became the antithesis of virtue and the essence of original sin. In the nineteenth century, a time when the progress of human ingenuity seemed to promise a decisive victory over fate, Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, latter-day Calvinists without a Calvinist theology, reminded their readers that human beings did not control their own fate. They argued, in effect, that fate could be conquered only by "wonder" and virtue—by grateful acceptance of a world that was not made solely for human enjoyment. Their insistence on human limitations, it seems to me, had a good deal in common with the populist critique of -15- "improvement," even though it was couched in a philosophical rather than a political idiom.

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But neither were they seduced by the rosy visions -226- of the future that circulated so widely in the Age of Reason and its aftermath. Criticism of progress drew on a variety of sources, but the most fruitful of all was the tradition of Christian prophecy, as reformulated by Calvin and his followers and, in the nineteenth century, by moral philosophers and social critics—notably Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson— in whom Calvinism remained a powerful background presence. No longer Calvinists or even Christians in any formal sense, Emerson and Carlyle nevertheless reasserted a prophetic understanding of history and human nature in opposition not only to the reigning celebration of progress but to the Burkean alternative.

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It is a gift in the fullest sense of the word, entrusted to them for safekeeping, and their intuitive, unself-conscious understanding of this fact is what makes them heroes in the first place. Their heroism lies in their acceptance of their fate, their willingness to be used for purposes not their own. Heroism is thus the reverse of "self-expression"—voluntary, hence triumphant, submission. * Emerson in His Contemporaries' Eyes: Stoic and "Seer" Ralph Waldo Emerson introduced Sartor Resartus to the American public and made no secret of his lifelong admiration for its author. Carlyle returned the compliment. "'In the wide Earth,' I say sometimes with a sigh, 'there is none but Emerson that responds to me with a voice wholly human!'" At first, Emerson's association with Carlyle heightened popular misgivings about the fatalistic overtones in his philosophy.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
by Ozan Varol
Published 13 Apr 2020

Maran, Pluto Confidential: An Insider Account of the Ongoing Battles Over the Status of Pluto (Dallas: Benbella Books, 2009), 4. 62. Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, “Exploring the Planets,” https://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/exploring-the-planets/online/discovery/greeks.cfm. 63. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 261. 64. In the Shadow of the Moon, directed by Dave Sington (Velocity/Think Film, 2008), DVD. 65. Virginia P. Dawson and Mark D. Bowles, eds., Realizing the Dream of Flight (Washington, DC: NASA History Division, 2005), 237. 66. Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (New York: W.W.

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Planet is derived from a Greek word that means “wanderer.” Ancient Greeks looked up at the sky and saw objects that moved against the relatively fixed positions of the stars. They called them wanderers.62 Like planets, science wanders. Upheaval precedes progress, and progress generates more upheaval. “People wish to be settled,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, but “only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”63 Those who cling to the past get left behind as the world marches forward. As the story of Pluto’s demotion shows, we tend to respond to uncertainty—no matter how benign—as alarming. But the key to growing comfortable with uncertainty is figuring out what’s truly alarming and what’s not.

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth
by A. O. Scott
Published 9 Feb 2016

Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. That is Ralph Waldo Emerson, in “The American Scholar,” going as usual to the mystical heart of the matter. The problem he identifies is not the alienation of the intellectual from society, but rather the estrangement of thinking from the totality of human life. And the consequence of this “divided or social state” is that people appear to one another as stunted creatures worthy of Dr.

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His place in the history of philosophical aesthetics is marginal at best, but that’s just a case of a thinker being excluded from a club in which he never sought membership in the first place. Pater belongs in the canon of English-language Victorian prose artists, along with Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and, of course, Oscar Wilde, the disciple who would eventually surpass him. And at its finest, say when he was writing about the Renaissance paintings he loved and did a great deal to introduce to the modern English-speaking public, Pater’s prose does approach the condition of music, as his thoughts are borne forward on sentences of complex beauty arranged in exquisite balance: Hers is the head upon which all “the ends of the world are come,” and the eyelids are a little weary.

Virus of the Mind
by Richard Brodie
Published 4 Jun 2009

I call the institutions that evolved on their own to become self-perpetuating cultural viruses. ttt 146 C hapter nine C ultur al Viruses “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson From the children’s game of “telephone,” we know that it’s difficult to copy memes with 100 percent fidelity even if we want to. When replication occurs with slight changes in the replicator, and those modified replicators are selected somehow for their fitness, then we have evolution. When a concept appears that has all the properties of a virus of the mind, then as it starts spreading through the population, the memes constituting that concept evolve.

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After a few years of thinking liberal thoughts and making decisions based on them—poof! You’re a liberal! It’s much more difficult and energy-consuming to start from scratch on every issue and really think it through than to attempt to be consistent with a particular set of beliefs. 204 Designer Viruses (How to Start a Cult) This is where Ralph Waldo Emerson comes in again, saying, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I often surprise people with what they perceive to be a lack of consistency in my points of view. Good! It means I’m staying off the cow paths! I wonder what would happen to someone like a Kennedy or Dole if they magically got appointed to the Senate for life and no longer had to be mouthpieces for the Left or Right.

Exoplanets: Hidden Worlds and the Quest for Extraterrestrial Life
by Donald Goldsmith
Published 9 Sep 2018

(In astronomical usage, a star’s luminosity specifies the star’s total energy output per second, including all types of radiation such as visible light, infrared, and ultraviolet. The luminosity remains independent of the star’s distance from an observer, which affects the star’s brightness, designated as the star’s “apparent brightness” by astronomers.) As Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, “for every thing you have missed, you have gained something else.”6 Unlike the A and B stars, whose joint output makes them the third-brightest star in the night sky (though they remain forever invisible from mid- or high northern latitudes), Proxima Centauri’s low luminosity renders it invisible to the unaided eye, close though it may be.

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Dava Sobel, A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos (New York: Walker & Company, 2011); Konrad Rudnicki, “The Generalized Cosmological Copernican Principle,” available at http://southerncrossreview.org/51/rudnicki4.htm. 5. Data available at http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/hd_20782_b/. 6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Compensation (1841). 7. Data for Proxima Centauri b are available at http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/proxima_cen_b/. 8. Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, “A Revised Estimate of the Occurrence Rate of Terrestrial Planets in the Habitable Zones around Kepler M-Dwarfs,” Astrophysical Journal Letters 767 (2013): L8. 9.

Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies
by Charles de Ganahl Koch
Published 14 Sep 2015

The good news is, Schumpeter was right: Nowadays, factory girls have access to the same silk stockings as queens. CHAPTER 4 Overcoming Bureaucracy and Stagnation ECONOMIC CONCEPTS TO SET YOU FREE The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON (ATTRIBUTED)1 One day in the early 1980s, I was sitting in the office of a vice president at a major oil company, listening with dismay to his tales of corporate woe: bureaucracy, resistance to change, red tape, and so forth. It sounded nightmarish to me. “How in the world does someone survive here?”

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Alwis, “Spoon-Feeding in ‘Do’ Disciplines,” CDTL Brief 3, no. 2 (May 2000), p. 5. 2. The Deming Videotapes: Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position (part of the MIT Video Series from the MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study), copyright 1983 MIT. 3. http://www.forbes.com​/quotes/author​/mary-beard. 4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series, “Self-Reliance” (Digireads, 2007), p. 21. 5. W. E. Deming, The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality, ed. J. Orsini and D. D. Cahill (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013), p. 105. 6. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 159.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier
Published 14 Feb 2012

morality to be central William Damon (1984), “Self-Understanding and Moral Development from Childhood to Adolescence, “ in William M. Kurtines and Jacob L. Gewirtz, eds., Morality, Moral Behavior, and Moral Development, John Wiley & Sons. spiritual geniuses René Girard (1999), Je Vois Satan Tomber Comme l'Éclair, Grasset English translation (2001), I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Orbis Books. Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841), “Self-Reliance,” in Essays: First Series. Henry David Thoreau Henry David Thoreau (1852), Walden. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich Laurel T. Ulrich (2007), Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, Alfred A. Knopf. Socrates's morals Plato (360 BCE), Crito, tr. Benjamin Jowett, MIT Classics Archive.

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Some people consider their morality to be central to their self-identity, while others consider it to be more peripheral. René Girard uses the term “spiritual geniuses” to describe the most moral of people. We also describe many of them as martyrs; being differently moral can be dangerous.5 Society, of course, wants the group interest to prevail. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents
by Gary Ginsberg
Published 14 Sep 2021

In 1838, he met the transcendentalist and illustrator Sophia Peabody, and they became engaged the following year. Two years later, just before Pierce left the Senate, Hawthorne (still unwed) ended up moving to Brook Farm, a utopian commune founded by Unitarian minister George Ripley, where he would meet the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Though Hawthorne did not agree with transcendentalism, he thought that living at Brook Farm would help him save money to marry Sophia and also give him time to write. Very quickly, though, Hawthorne realized he had made a big mistake. His designated job was to shovel and transport manure, an ordeal that left him with blistered hands and little time for writing.

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The dedication sealed his fate as an outlier if not persona non grata among his literary peers and the intellectual elite of his native New England. As Hawthorne lamented at the time, “My friends have dropped off from me like autumn leaves.” Henry David Thoreau likened Pierce to the devil and viewed Hawthorne as scarcely better. Longfellow publicly ended his connections to Hawthorne. Ralph Waldo Emerson also followed suit. When Hawthorne personally sent Emerson a copy of the book, Emerson ripped out the pages containing the gushing, heartfelt dedication, “To A Friend”: And now farewell, my dear friend; and excuse (if you think it needs any excuse) the freedom with which I thus publicly assert a personal friendship between a private individual and a statesman who has filled what was then the most august position in the world.

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It was covered in ivy, fresh roses, pansies, and forget-me-nots, which Daisy had planted herself. “I think he loves it as it is now, because it has been fixed by the hands that love him.” CHAPTER 6 Harry Truman and Eddie Jacobson Beshert In 1899, fifteen-year-old Harry S. Truman penned an essay on courage that opened with his favorite quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Behavior is the mirror in which each man shows his image.” For the young Harry, that quote seemed to capture his life’s mantra. It echoed the Horatio Alger myths he grew up reading, those rags-to-riches stories about humble boys working hard to achieve lives of middle-class comfort. Like Alger, Emerson affirmed a kind of pioneer positivity that Truman worshipped: the conviction that personal behavior could change the course of history; that right and wrong existed purely and unambiguously; and that by displaying a certain gutsiness, a man could create an image he’d be proud of.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

“an object among other objects”: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 89. “relate to our self in the third person”: Nancy Colier, “The Branding of the Self,” Psychology Today, August 15, 2012. “A foolish consistency”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Journals, ed. Lewis Mumford (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 95. “is a machine”: Lilly Singh, “I’ll See You Soon…,” YouTube, November 12, 2018, at 2:43. “Come for the nectar of approval”: Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine (London: Indigo Press, 2019), chapter 2, part IX.

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You can tweak a brand, spin it off, and refresh it—but change its fundamentals and you have yourself a dilution crisis and many indignant customers. In the absence of a stable salary (since those have largely evaporated), that displeasure can translate into a direct drop in personal income. In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”; in the same passage, he worried that individuals were getting stuck in “a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.”

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
by Peter Marshall
Published 2 Jan 1992

Bondman, 1949), p. 147 67 Ibid. 68 Quoted in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, op. cit., p. 273n 69 Wilde, ‘De Profundis’ (1905), De Profundis and Other Writings, op. cit., p. 180 70 ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, op. cit., p. 46 71 Ibid., p. 21 72 Ibid., pp. 30–1 73 Ibid., pp. 30, 46 74 Ibid., p. 40 75 Ibid., p. 22 76 Ibid., p. 20 77 Ibid., p. 32 78 Ibid., p. 36 79 Ibid., p. 47 80 Ibid., p. 53 81 Ibid., p. 49 82 Wilde to Cunninghame Graham, quoted in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, op. cit., p. 526 83 ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ (1896), The Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins, c. 1933), p. 197 Chapter Fourteen 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Politics’ (1844), The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1940), p. 430; Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. E. W. Emerson & W. E. Forbes (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1909–14), III, 200 2 Journals, op. cit., V, 302–3 3 The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), I, pp. 412–13 4 Emerson to Walt Whitman, 21 July 1855, quoted by Justin Kaplan, ‘Introduction’, Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1892) (New York: Bantam, 1983), p. xix 5 Whitman, ‘A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads’, ibid., p. 451 6 ‘Thought’, ibid., p. 223 7 ‘A Backward Glance’, ibid., pp. 452–3 8 ‘To the States’, ibid., p. 224 9 ‘To the States’, ibid., p. 7 10 Quoted by W.

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While they came close to anarchism, the writers Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau expressed most keenly the libertarian ideal. Their independent stance directly inspired later anarchists and their combination of ‘Transcendental Individualism’ with a search for a creative life close to nature finds echoes in the counter-culture and Green movements of the late-twentieth century. Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson was the elder guru of the Transcendentalists of New England. After Harvard University, he entered the ministry, only to abandon it and sail to Europe, where he became a friend of Carlyle. He returned to Massachusetts and was soon installed as ‘the Sage of Concord’, attracting a literary-philosophical coterie.

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Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) Dolgoff, Sam, ed., The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939 (Montréal: Black Rose, 1974) Dolgoff, Sam, The Cuban Revolution: A Critical Perspective (Montréal: Black Rose, 1976) Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Journals, eds. E. W. Emerson & W. E. Forbes, (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1909–14) Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939) Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Complete Essays and other Writings, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1940) Faure, Sébastien, Autorité el liberté (Paris: Aux Bureaux de la Révolte, 1891) Faure, Sébastien, La Douleur universelle, philosophie liberatire (Paris: Savine, 1895) Faure, Sébastien, L’Encyclopédie anarchiste, 4 vols.

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Published 1 Jan 2009

In the next chapter we will look in a little more detail at why people in the developed world are so sensitive to inequality that it can exert such a major effect on the psychological and social wellbeing of modern populations. 3 How inequality gets under the skin ’Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life How is it that we are affected as strongly by inequality and our position within society as the data in the last chapter suggest? Before exploring – as we shall in the next nine chapters – the relations between inequality and a wide range of social problems, including those in our Index of Health and Social Problems, we want to suggest why human beings might be so sensitive to inequality.

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Instead of accepting each other as equals on the basis of our common humanity as we might in more equal settings, getting the measure of each other becomes more important as status differences widen. We come to see social position as a more important feature of a person’s identity. Between strangers it may often be the dominant feature. As Ralph Waldo Emerson, the nineteenth-century American philosopher, said, ‘ ’Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it.’19 Indeed, psychological experiments suggest that we make judgements of each other’s social status within the first few seconds of meeting.20 No wonder first impressions count, and no wonder we feel social evaluation anxieties!

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia
by Andrew Lih
Published 5 Jul 2010

Nupedia was too much process, too little volunteer output, and not enough money. And it most certainly wasn’t fun. Something had to change. Chapter 3_ WIKI ORIGINS “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” —Eric S. Raymond (1998) “Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson Nupedia was at a standstill at the end of 2000, even though it had gathered a sizeable set of volunteers. Larry and Jimmy knew their concept was not working, because after a year’s worth of work, all the finished articles bound together would have produced only a booklet. Still believing the project had to be centrally edited, they were stuck for new ideas.

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It would prove later to be a rich resource for Wikipedia, as that nascent community started to run into issues that MeatballWiki had documented and discussed at length. One of the folks who stumbled across the new WikiWikiWeb creation was Ben Kovitz, who was working as a programmer at the time. Remember him? He would provide the lifeline to Nupedia. Chapter 4_ WIKI INTRODUCED “Every artist was first an amateur.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson “History is too serious to be left to historians.” —Ian Macleod After both Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales found out about WikiWikiWeb software and its use for collaboration, both were keen on it helping kick-start Nupedia’s lackluster pace. Nupedia was simply not working, because people were not collaborating efficiently and articles were not being generated fast enough.

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
by Jeff Speck
Published 13 Nov 2012

Imagine two brothers eating lunch alongside a dock in Dublin, Palermo, Bombay, or Formosa and looking wistfully out to sea. One of them had the balls to get on a boat and the other one didn’t. Guess whose kids are the Americans? American mobility far precedes the automobile. Before Lewis Mumford declared that “our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf,”1 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “everything good is on the highway.” Soon after him, Walt Whitman waxed: “O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you—yet I love you. You express me better than I can express myself.”2 But it is an easy out to say that wayfaring is an inescapable part of our DNA, and ignore the other factors that make cities in the United States different from those in Canada or Australia—two other countries that at least started the way ours did.

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Ibid., 92. 22. John Holtzclaw, “Using Residential Patterns and Transit to Decrease Auto Dependence and Costs.” 23. “2010 Quality of Living Worldwide City Rankings,” Mercer.com. 24. Newman, Beatley, and Boyer, 99. STEP 1: PUT CARS IN THEIR PLACE 1. Dom Nozzi, http://domz60.wordpress.com/quotes/. 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience” (1844), quoted in Cotton Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 16; Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road” (1856). 3. Seiler, 94. 4. David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries, 8. 5. Patrick Condon,“Canadian Cities American Cities: Our Differences Are the Same,” 16. 6. Ibid., 8. 7. Witold Rybczynski, City Life, 160–61. 8.

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
by Andrew Blum
Published 28 May 2012

But at this point Westesson was late for his next meeting, and becoming a little restless. I had the sense he wasn’t late often. He walked me to the elevator. “Well, we’ve only just scratched the barest surface,” he said. But it seemed we had actually gone quite far. In his essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson crosses “a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky.” And yet even that ho-hum journey brings him “a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.... I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all.” On a journey to the center of the Internet my bare common turned out to be the router lab.

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In London, I’m grateful for the time and assistance of Tim Anker of the Colocation Exchange; Pat Vicary at Tata; John Souter, Jeremy Orbell, and Colin Silcock at the London Internet Exchange; Nigel and Benedicte Titley; Dionne Aiken, Michelle Reid, and Bob Harris at Telehouse; and Matthew Finnie and Mark Lewis at Interoute. James Tyler and Rob Coupland at Telecity spent the better part of a day showing off their impressive pieces of the Internet. In his essay, “Nature”: Stephen E. Whicher, Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 24. Google announced the purchase of 111 Eighth Avenue: Rich Miller, “Google Confirms Purchase of 111 8th Avenue,” Data Center Knowledge (http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/12/22/google-confirms-purchase-of-111-8th-avenue/).

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
by Chris Hayes
Published 11 Jun 2012

But the longer this Crisis of Authority persists, the more it runs the risk of metastasizing into something that could threaten what we most cherish about American life: our ability to self-correct, to somehow, even seemingly against all odds, make the future better than the past. Chapter 2 MERITOCRACY AND ITS DISCONTENTS The existence of an upper class is not injurious, as long as it is dependent on merit. — RALPH WALDO EMERSON WHETHER WE THINK ABOUT IT MUCH OR NOT, WE all believe in meritocracy. It is embedded in our very language: to call an organization, a business, or an institution “meritocratic” is to pay it a high compliment; to call it bureaucratic is to insult it. On the portion of its website devoted to recruiting talent, Goldman Sachs tells potential recruits that “Goldman Sachs is a meritocracy.”

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Fractal inequality means that status is never fixed, no success ever final. It means always looking at the next rung up on the social ladder, a posture that makes it very difficult to empathize with those on the rungs below. Twenge’s long-term data show a marked increase in precisely this psychological profile. Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed that “each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it.” In twenty-first-century America, this basic human instinct has been cultivated into a guiding ethos. Our culture is overrun with lists and rankings: the most beautiful people, the most influential politicians, the top 500 wealthiest moguls.

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy
by Paolo Gerbaudo
Published 19 Jul 2018

Beyond anti-party suspicion The assertion about the ultimate withering away of the party, accompanied by the cognate thesis of the withering away of the nation-state in times of globalisation, echoes a long history of anti-party suspicion – one informed by the rejection of party authoritarianism and totalitarianism – which has acquired new strength in neoliberal times. Personalities as different as George Washington, James Madison, Heinrich Von Treitsche, Moisei Ostrogorski, John Stuart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Simone Weil vocally criticised the political party.24 They alerted to the fact that political parties militated against individuals’ independent judgement, calling for obedience and uniformity, and highlighted that rather than pursuing the general interests of society, they mostly ended up defending the narrow interest of a faction.

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Many of these critical interventions on the political party can be found in the collection Perspectives on political parties: classic readings, edited by S. Scarrow (New York: Springer, 2002). Also see Simone Weil, On the abolition of all political parties (New York: New York Review of Books, 2014). 25. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in his journals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p.78. 26. Simone Weil, On the abolition of all political parties (New York: New York Review of Books, 2014), p.49. 27. A great deal has been written about totalitarian parties, a topic that is important for its general implications on the theory of the political party.

The Communist Manifesto
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Published 1 Aug 2002

, Willa Cather, 0-553-21358-X THE CANTERBURY TALES, Geoffrey Chaucer, 0-553-21082-3 STORIES, Anton Chekhov, 0-553-38100-8 THE AWAKENING, Kate Chopin, 0-553-21330-X THE WOMAN IN WHITE, Wilkie Collins, 0-553-21263-X HEART OF DARKNESS and THE SECRET SHARER, Joseph Conrad, 0-553-21214-1 LORD JIM, Joseph Conrad, 0-553-21361-X THE DEERSLAYER, James Fenimore Cooper, 0-553-21085-8 THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, James Fenimore Cooper, 0-553-21329-6 MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS AND OTHER SHORT FICTION, Stephen Crane, 0-553-21355-5 THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, Stephen Crane, 0-553-21011-4 INFERNO, Dante, 0-553-21339-3 PARADISO, Dante, 0-553-21204-4 PURGATORIO, Dante, 0-553-21344-X THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, Charles Darwin, 0-553-21463-2 MOLL FLANDERS, Daniel Defoe, 0-553-21328-8 ROBINSON CRUSOE, Daniel Defoe, 0-553-21373-3 BLEAK HOUSE, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21223-0 A CHRISTMAS CAROL, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21244-3 DAVID COPPERFIELD, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21189-7 GREAT EXPECTATIONS, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21342-3 HARD TIMES, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21016-5 OLIVER TWIST, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21102-1 THE PICKWICK PAPERS, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21123-4 A TALE OF TWO CITIES, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21176-5 THREE SOLDIERS, John Dos Passos, 0-553-21456-X THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21216-8 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21175-7 THE ETERNAL HUSBAND AND OTHER STORIES, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21444-6 THE IDIOT, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21352-0 NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21144-7 SHERLOCK HOLMES VOL I, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 0-553-21241-9 SHERLOCK HOLMES VOL II, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 0-553-21242-7 SISTER CARRIE, Theodore Dreiser, 0-553-21374-1 THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, W. E. B. Du Bois, 0-553-21336-9 THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, Alexandre Dumas, 0-553-21350-4 THE THREE MUSKETEERS, Alexandre Dumas, 0-553-21337-7 MIDDLEMARCH, George Eliot, 0-553-21180-3 SILAS MARNER, George Eliot, 0-553-21229-X SELECTED ESSAYS, LECTURES, AND POEMS, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 0-553-21388-1 TEN PLAYS BY EURIPIDES, Euripides, 0-553-21363-6 APRIL MORNING, Howard Fast, 0-553-27322-1 MADAME BOVARY, Gustave Flaubert, 0-553-21341-5 HOWARDS END, E. M. Forster, 0-553-21208-7 A ROOM WITH A VIEW, E. M. Forster, 0-553-21323-7 THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL, Anne Frank, 0-553-57712-3 ANNE FRANK'S TALES FROM THE SECRET ANNEX, Anne Frank, 0-553-58638-6 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND OTHER WRITINGS, Benjamin Franklin, 0-553-21075-0 THE YELLOW WALLPAPER AND OTHER WRITINGS, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 0-553-21375-X FAUST: FIRST PART, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 0-553-21348-2 THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS, Kenneth Grahame, 0-553-21368-7 THE COMPLETE FAIRY TALES OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM, The Brothers Grimm, 0-553-38216-0 ROOTS, Alex Haley, 0-440-17464-3 FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21331-8 JUDE THE OBSCURE, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21191-9 THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21024-6 THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21269-9 TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21168-4 THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 0-553-21270-2 THE SCARLET LETTER, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 0-553-21009-2 THE FAIRY TALES OF HERMANN HESSE, Hermann Hesse, 0-553-37776-0 SIDDHARTHA, Hermann Hesse, 0-553-20884-5 THE ODYSSEY OF HOMER, Homer, 0-553-21399-7 THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, Victor Hugo, 0-553-21370-9 FOUR GREAT PLAYS, Henrik Ibsen, 0-553-21280-X THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY, Henry James, 0-553-21127-7 THE TURN OF THE SCREW AND OTHER SHORT FICTION, Henry James, 0-553-21059-9 A COUNTRY DOCTOR, Sarah Orne Jewett, 0-553-21498-5 DUBLINERS, James Joyce, 0-553-21380-6 A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, James Joyce, 0-553-21404-7 THE METAMORPHOSIS, Franz Kafka, 0-553-21369-5 THE STORY OF MY LIFE, Helen Keller, 0-553-21387-3 CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS, Rudyard Kipling, 0-553-21190-0 THE JUNGLE BOOKS, Rudyard Kipling, 0-553-21199-4 KIM, Rudyard Kipling, 0-553-21332-6 LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER, D.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
by Michael Pollan
Published 22 Apr 2013

Cooking puts several kinds of distance between the brutal facts of the matter (dead animal for dinner) and the dining-room table set with crisp linens and polished silver. In this, CAFO meat may be just an extreme instance of the general case, which has never been pretty. “You have just dined,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.” The problem is not a new one, and we flatter ourselves if we think we’re the first people to feel moral or spiritual qualms about killing animals for our supper.

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If you stand in a wheat field at this time of year, a few weeks from harvest, it’s not hard to imagine you’re looking at something out of mythology: all this golden sunlight brought down to earth, captured in kernels of gold, and rendered fit for mortals to eat. But of course this is no myth at all, just the plain miraculous fact. Part IV EARTH FERMENTATION’S COLD FIRE “God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson “The taste for partial spoilage can become a passion, an embrace of the earthy side of life that expresses itself best in paradoxes.” —Harold McGee “No poems can please long or live that are written by water drinkers.” —Horace Ferment I. Vegetable Consider, just for a moment, the everyday proximity of death.

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Probably because it is the model for the state of altered consciousness, or one of them. (Dreams would be another.) And because the fastest, most direct route to altered consciousness is an intoxicant, the most widely available one for most of human history being the molecule manufactured by S. cerevisiae. The poet, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, speaks “not with intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated with nectar.” Put another way, new perceptions and metaphors arise when the spirit of Dionysus breaks Apollo’s tight grip on the rational mind. “As the traveller who has lost his way throws the reins on his horse’s neck and trusts to the instincts of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world.”

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History
by Derek S. Hoff
Published 30 May 2012

Also see discussion of this letter in Cocks, “Malthusian Theory in Pre–Civil War America,” 344–45. 88. McCoy, Elusive Republic, 193. 89. Gibson, Americans versus Malthus, chap. 2 90. Alexander H. Everett, New Ideas on Population (London: John Miller, 1823), 9. 91. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Plato; Or, the Philosopher,” in The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Random House, 1950), 478. 92. Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order, 80. 93. William Diamond, “Nathaniel A. Ware, National Economist,” Journal of Southern History 5 (November 1939): 511–12. 94. Ibid., 518. 95. Nathaniel A.

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Crunching the numbers on the American land-to-person ratio after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, these early statisticians concluded that ease of emigration to the western frontier would allow the states to enjoy the benefits of increased population density in older areas without the social drawbacks Europe 30 chapter 1 endured.89 Diplomat Alexander Everett criticized Malthus for failing to see that every additional person is a producer as well as a consumer,90 and Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that ancient philosophers “saw before them no sinister political economy; no ominous Malthus.”91 Antebellum writers who claimed that the Malthusian model was inapplicable to their wide-open, thinly populated, and democratic land often espoused an early version of American “exceptionalism,” the conviction that America is the apple of God’s eye.92 A determination to develop a political economy shaped by America’s unique climate, high birthrate, and huge land mass rather than by European experiences reinforced this exceptionalism.

Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears

“Give it time to turn in upon itself, satisfy its restless search for knowledge, and it will give birth to health, to animal spirits, to everything which invigorates the body while it’s advancing by every step the capacities of the soul.” Through the 1860s, self-help writers argued that intellectual labors provided excitement and ambition “of a nature calculated to cheer the mind, and to give the animal spirits a salutary impulse” as the critic Lindley Murray wrote in the Clarksville (Tenn.) Chronicle. No less a sage than Ralph Waldo Emerson saw animal spirits as the key to persuasive power: “A cold, sluggish blood thinks it has not facts enough to the purpose, and must decline its turn in the conversation,” Emerson wrote. “But they who speak have no more,—have less. ’T is not new facts that avail, but the heat to dissolve everybody’s facts.

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“imparts a much greater degree”: “Ripe Bread,” Christian Reflector 10 (May 13, 1847), 76. “The mind is like”: Willis, Somerset Herald and Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Register, Oct. 12, 1847, 3. “of a nature calculated”: Lindley Murray, “Employment Essential to Health,” Clarksville Chronicle, March 9, 1860, 1. “A cold, sluggish blood”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters (1870), 11. “something invisible”: Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Beacon Press, ed. 1955), 14. “I am too old”: Horace Smith, “The Wisdom of Laughter,” Evergreen 1 (Jan. 1, 1840), 24. 4. FEVERISH FINANCE, REVIVAL RELIGION, AND WAR “a houseful, a hole full”: Frederick Jackson, cited in Ann Fabian, “Speculation on Distress: The Popular Discourse of the Panics of 1837 and 1857,” Yale Journal of Criticism (1989), 135.

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“The public began to take”: Eunice Beecher, quoted in Ladies’ Home Journal (1891), cited in ibid., 217. “It is perfect”: Henry Ward Beecher, Yale Lectures on Preaching (1872), I, 73–74. “Mary Hallock, sit still!”: Mary Hallock Foote, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West (1972), cited in Applegate, Beecher, 366. “men who are self-trusting”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, cited by Rutherford B. Hayes, Diary and Letters, I, 301–3, cited in ibid. “The greatest part of a seed”: Henry Ward Beecher, “The Life of Christ:—Within,” preached Oct. 8, 1865, in Sermons, vol. 1 (1869), 141. “this vitality of a Christian soul”: Henry Ward Beecher, “Sermon: The Life Force in Men,” Christian Union 15 (April 4, 1877), 305.

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution
by Henry Schlesinger
Published 16 Mar 2010

It would take decades before the battery would emerge in any significant role outside the lab, and even then, it came in an unpredicted area—that of communication via the telegraph. 4 Science, Showmanship, and the Voltaic Pile “More than the diamond Koh-i-noor, which glitters among their crown jewels, they prize the dull pebble which is wiser than a man, whose poles turn themselves to the poles of the world, and whose axis is parallel to the axis of the world. Now, their toys are steam and galvanism.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits From the perspective of our technologically jaded age in which scientific and technical breakthroughs often rate little more than a perfunctory nod of acknowledgment, it is difficult to imagine the excitement science provoked among the general public during the early part of the nineteenth century.

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Adored thee in thy majesty of visible creation, And searched into thy hidden and mysterious ways As Poet, as Philosopher, as Sage? A friend of William Wordsworth, Davy persuaded the poet that natural philosophers were akin to poets in their search for meaning, and later edited Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, while Coleridge attended scientific lectures in search of metaphors. And in America, Ralph Waldo Emerson, starting his first journal after leaving Harvard in 1820, listed Davy’s Elements of Chemical Philosophy as a book he intended to read. Percy Bysshe Shelley, perhaps the most romantic of the Romantic poets, was himself an enthusiastic amateur natural philosopher for much of his short life.

The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis
by Ruth Defries
Published 8 Sep 2014

Energy from fossil fuels replaced the energy from lightning and the microbes’ metabolism in the planet’s nitrogen-cycling machinery. The far-ranging significance of the pivot from human muscle and animal brawn to fossil fuels as a prime source of energy caught the attention of American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Coal lay in ledges under the ground . . . until a laborer with pickax and windlass brings it to the surface. We may call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization.” Written in 1860, decades before the black diamonds paved the way for a resolution to the nitrogen bottleneck, these words were more prescient than Emerson likely thought.

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A review of the economic and ecological constraints on animal draft cultivation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Soil and Tillage Research 27:195–210. El-Sharkawy, M. 1993. Drought-tolerant cassava for Africa, Asia, and Latin America. BioScience 43:441–451. Emerson, R. 2003. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Conduct of Life. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Erisman, J., M. Sutton, J. Galloway, Z. Klimont, and W. Winiwarter. 2008. How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world. Nature Geoscience 1:636–639. Feller, C., L. Thuries, R. Manlay, P. Robin, and E. Frossard. 2003. “The principles of rational agriculture” by Albrecht Daniel Thaer (1752–1828): An approach to the sustainability of cropping systems at the beginning of the 19th century.

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Apr 2015

William Jewett Tucker, a theologian who would later serve as the ninth president of Dartmouth College, wrote an eviscerating review of Carnegie’s first ‘Wealth’ essay, suggesting, ‘I can conceive of no greater mistake most disastrous to the end of religion if not to society than that of trying to make charity do the work of justice’.16 Tucker’s views bear a trace of the earlier writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, in essays such as ‘Self-Reliance’, spurned what he saw as the infantilizing effect of charity, the tendency for giving to entrench a relation of inequality between individuals where shared appreciation of their equality and individuality should flourish. In a stunning denunciation of Christian morality, Emerson scorns Samaritan notions of one’s duty to strangers, to one’s immediate brethren, to fellow countrymen.

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As he points out, abolition inroads were first made not by English or American abolitionists but by Jacobin revolutionaries and the black peasantry of Saint Domingue (later Haiti). Robin Blackburn, ‘Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of Democratic Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 4 (2006), 643–74. 19Quoted in Michael Lopez, ‘The Conduct of Life: Emerson’s Anatomy of Power’, in Joel Porte and Saundra Morris, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 246. 20Baudelaire’s short story, ‘Counterfeit Money’, first published in 1869, is excerpted in full as an appendix in Jacques Derrida’s Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 21Mareike Schomerus; Tim Allen, and Koen Vlassennott, ‘Kony 2012 and the Prospect for Change’ Foreign Affairs (March 13, 2012). 22Michael E.

Magic Internet Money: A Book About Bitcoin
by Jesse Berger
Published 14 Sep 2020

That is nearly 1% of the value of all fiat currency. The gap between those values is only partially indicative of the addressable market for Bitcoin should it continue to develop and improve into decidedly better money. 8.3 Bitcoin Versus Gold “The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Writer & Philosopher As the previous backbone of the world’s monetary system, in addition to being a scarce and beautiful asset, gold retains a significant amount of value and is a globally recognized symbol of wealth. Today, all the known gold in the world is estimated to be valued at over $8 trillion USD.

Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy
by Michael Knox Beran
Published 2 Aug 2021

As for Lizzie Borden (she of the forty whacks), Henry Judd Gray (the double-indemnity murderer), and Theodore “Ted” Bundy, they were not the sort of people with whom WASPs were on visiting terms, however many genetic haplogroup markers they might have had in common. WASPs are creatures of guilt and self-questioning, more likely to kill themselves than kill others. Suicide blighted whole families. There were the Sturgises, an old Boston family with a “tendency to suicidal mania.” Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of his horror when, in June 1853, he heard the “dismal tidings” that young Susan Sturgis Bigelow had swallowed arsenic: three of Susan’s sister Ellen’s children (one of whom was to marry Henry Adams) would also go on to kill themselves. The Gardners too: Joseph Peabody Gardner, in whom was concentrated the blood of a dozen old Massachusetts families, blew his brains out in 1875.

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‘Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know What life is, you who hold it in your hands’; (Slowly twisting the lilac stalks) ‘You let it flow from you, you let it flow…’ In his early poems, Eliot, though not out of his twenties, compresses a quantity of WASP morbidity—the dowagers with their footmen and housemaids, the spinsters who live through the pages of the Boston Evening Transcript, the lonely men in shirtsleeves leaning voyeuristically out of windows—into brief images of despair, like those in the Inferno. For the poetry of the WASPs is, Eliot thinks, inadequate, and their prophets are false. Matthew Arnold and Ralph Waldo Emerson wanted to liberate potential, but their books now rest on glazen shelves: “Matthew and Waldo” are for Eliot guardians of a faith that has failed. Yet he sees, too, that the rebellion of younger WASPs is as unfruitful, and he makes fun of “Cousin Nancy,” who “smoked/And danced all the modern dances,” as she vainly rides to hounds over barren hills and muddy cow-pastures

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“never went out at night”: Michael Knox Beran, “The Aristocracy and Its Discontents,” Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2009. “that bitch”: Ibid. 2. A DYING RACE “tendency to suicidal mania”: Natalie Dykstra, Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2012), 210. “dismal tidings”: The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson 1852–1855, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1977), 177. “the family disease”: John Sedgwick, In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 9–10. “queerness”: M. A. DeWolfe Howe, John Jay Chapman and His Letters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), 21.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated
by Gautam Baid
Published 1 Jun 2020

True expert knowledge in life and investing does not exist, only varying degrees of ignorance. This is not a problem to solve; it is simply how the world works. We cannot know everything, but we can work hard to become just about smart enough to make above-average decisions over time. That is the key to successful compounding. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.” Learning and accepting help from others creates value far beyond our individual capabilities. Look at every interaction as an opportunity to learn from the people you meet. You will be amazed at how quickly you grow and how much better you become, both as a professional and, more important, as a human being.

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Love people and use things, because the opposite never works. Love is caring without an agenda. Love isn’t something we fall into; it’s someone we become. CHAPTER 10 LIVING LIFE ACCORDING TO THE INNER SCORECARD To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. —Ralph Waldo Emerson The path to true success is through authenticity. —Guy Spier According to Warren Buffett, there are two kinds of people in life: those who care what people think of them, and those who care how good they really are. Buffett always remains true to himself and never compromises on his values.

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Buffett has always ranked temperament higher than intellect as a prerequisite for successful investing. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Don’t let exuberant markets get to your head. Don’t let pessimistic markets get to your heart. Volatility of the mind is far riskier than volatility of the stock price, and an objective mind is key to investing success. Remember, disruptions may be accelerating, but human nature and investor psychology have not changed in centuries.

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
by Donella H. Meadows , Jørgen Randers and Dennis L. Meadows
Published 15 Apr 2004

We mean that literally. Within the limits of space, time, materials, and energy, visionary human intentions can bring forth not only new information, new feedback loops, new behavior, new knowledge, and new technology, but also new institutions, new physical structures, and new powers within human beings. Ralph Waldo Emerson recognized this profound truth 150 years ago: Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to their moral state, or their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man's mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers.

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Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2000). 8. Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1944), 398-399. Chapter 8. Tools for the Transition to Sustainability 1. Donald Worster, editor, The Ends of the Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 11-12. 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lecture on "War," delivered in Boston, March 1838. Reprinted in Emerson's Complete Works, vol. 11 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887), 177. 3. Examples of networks known to the authors and in their field of interest are the Balaton Group (www.unh.edu/ipssr/Balaton.html), Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), Center for a New American Dream (CNAD; wwwnewdream.org), Greenlist (www.peacestore.us/Public/Greenlist), Greenclips (wwwgreenclips.com), Northern Forest Alliance (wwwnorthernforestalliance.org), Land Trust Alliance (wwwlta.org), International Simulation and Gaming Association (ISAGA; wwwisaga.info), and Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD). 4.

You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall
by Colin Ellard
Published 6 Jul 2009

A part of this impulse must surely arise because, deep in our bones, we understand the need to belong to particular places. Landmarks, because they locate us, are integral to the fulfillment of that need. CHAPTER 3 LOOKING FOR ROUTES HOW WE TRY TO KEEP TRACK OF WHERE WE ARE BY NOTING WHERE WE HAVE BEEN The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor. RALPH WALDO EMERSON In an ancient Greek legend, King Minos of Knossos commanded his brilliant engineer, Daedalus, to build a safe confinement for the Minotaur, a hideous beast born of an illicit union between Minos’s wife and a white bull thrown from the sea by Poseidon. Daedalus built a labyrinth—an enormous cavern filled with passages of vast complexity and almost impossible to navigate.

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Although our minds may be predisposed to detach us from real space, much more than a psychological predisposition has been at work in driving us from Eden to Gotham. Jane Jacobs blames our tendency to insulate ourselves from nature on an impulse born of the European romantic movement, perhaps transported across the Atlantic in the guise of the New England transcendental movement espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.2 At first, the connection between intellectual movements that cherished emotional contact with wild nature and the current difficulties in our relationship with the environment may be difficult to discern, but Jacobs’s argument was that by raising wild places onto a pedestal, we convinced ourselves that life in our cities had nothing to do with the natural world.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
by Adam Grant
Published 2 Feb 2016

Instead of causing us to rebel because traditional avenues are closed, the protagonists in our favorite stories may inspire originality by opening our minds to unconventional paths. 7 Rethinking Groupthink The Myths of Strong Cultures, Cults, and Devil’s Advocates “In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.” Ralph Waldo Emerson Standing on stage in front of a captive audience, a technology icon pulled a new device out of his pocket. It was so much smaller than competing products that no one in the room could believe his eyes. The founder’s flair for theatrical product launches wasn’t the only source of his fame.

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no-ist. reading Harry Potter can improve: Loris Vezzali, Sofia Stathi, Dino Giovannini, Dora Capozza, and Elena Trifiletti, “The Greatest Magic of Harry Potter: Reducing Prejudice,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 45 (2015): 105–21. 7: Rethinking Groupthink “In fact, the only sin”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1893). Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid: Mary Tripsas and Giovanni Gavetti, “Capabilities, Cognition, and Inertia: Evidence from Digital Imaging,” Strategic Management Journal 21 (2000): 1147–61; Victor K. McElheny, Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Milton P.

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources
by Geoff Hiscock
Published 23 Apr 2012

International Energy Agency, Medium-Term Oil and Gas Markets 2011, (St. Petersburg, Russia: International Energy Agency, 16 June 2011). CHAPTER 6 Old Coal Still Burning Brightly Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago, but it is put to better use. —Nineteenth-century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson For the Panama-flagged coal ship Pasha Bulker, there was nowhere to hide from the violent storm known as an “east coast low,” that overwhelmed it one winter’s morning in June 2007. The 77,000-dwt Panamax-class ship, which had been launched in Japan only a year earlier, had spent the previous two weeks in the coal queue that forms off the Port of Newcastle on the Australian east coast.

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Media release, “Wood Mackenzie Says That Iron Ore Suppliers Will Not be Able to Meet Market Demand Until at Least 2015,” Sydney/Edinburgh/Houston, 20 July 2011. CHAPTER 11 U.S. Energy Hail to the Shale The resources of America and its future will be immense only to wise and virtuous men. —Nineteenth-century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works, Volume VIII, Letters and Social Aims, “Resources” essay, 1876 A s the second decade of the twenty-first century unfolds, it is clear the United States will have to cede some of its Asia-Pacific regional influence to China and learn to live in a world where there are two superpowers.

Fred Schwed's Where Are the Customers' Yachts?: A Modern-Day Interpretation of an Investment Classic
by Leo Gough
Published 22 Aug 2010

OTHER TITLES IN THE INFINITE SUCCESS SERIES Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness Carl von Clausewitz’s On War Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds Frank Bettger’s How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling George S. Clason’s The Richest Man in Babylon Karl Marx’s Das Kapital Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self Reliance Robert Collier’s The Secret of the Ages Samuel Smiles’s Self-help Sun Tzu’s The Art of War FRED SCHWED’S WHERE ARE THE CUSTOMERS’ YACHTS? A MODERN-DAY INTERPRETATION OF AN INVESTMENT CLASSIC BY LEO GOUGH Copyright © Infinite Ideas Limited, 2010 The right of Leo Gough to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Decline of the English Murder
by George Orwell
Published 24 Jul 2009

Seneca On the Shortness of Life Marcus Aurelius Meditations St Augustine Confessions of a Sinner Thomas à Kempis The Inner Life Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince Michel de Montaigne On Friendship Jonathan Swift A Tale of a Tub Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract Edward Gibbon The Christians and the Fall of Rome Thomas Paine Common Sense Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman William Hazlitt On the Pleasure of Hating Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto Arthur Schopenhauer On the Suffering of the World John Ruskin On Art and Life Charles Darwin On Natural Selection Friedrich Nietzsche Why I am So Wise Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own Sigmund Freud Civilization and Its Discontents George Orwell Why I Write Confucius The First Ten Books Sun-tzu The Art of War Plato The Symposium Lucretius Sensation and Sex Cicero An Attack on an Enemy of Freedom The Revelation of St John the Divine and The Book of Job Marco Polo Travels in the Land of Kubilai Khan Christine de Pizan The City of Ladies Baldesar Castiglione How to Achieve True Greatness Francis Bacon Of Empire Thomas Hobbes Of Man Sir Thomas Browne Urne-Burial Voltaire Miracles and Idolatry David Hume On Suicide Carl von Clausewitz On the Nature of War Søren Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling Henry David Thoreau Where I Lived, and What I Lived For Thorstein Veblen Conspicuous Consumption Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus Hannah Arendt Eichmann and the Holocaust Plutarch In Consolation to his Wife Robert Burton Some Anatomies of Melancholy Blaise Pascal Human Happiness Adam Smith The Invisible Hand Edmund Burke The Evils of Revolution Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature Søren Kierkegaard The Sickness unto Death John Ruskin The Lamp of Memory Friedrich Nietzsche Man Alone with Himself Leo Tolstoy A Confession William Morris Useful Work v. Useless Toil Frederick Jackson Turner The Significance of the Frontier in American History Marcel Proust Days of Reading Leon Trotsky An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe Sigmund Freud The Future of an Illusion Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction George Orwell Books v.

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?
by Thomas Geoghegan
Published 20 Sep 2011

By 3 P.M., it was night again, and, depressed, I walked into a café called the Hoechst. At a table, there was a woman my age who looked like Veronica Lake; it could have been a movie except she was reading The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and doodling. I sat near her—not so much to meet her as to get away from all the other Germans sitting there with dogs. I was so lonely that I tried to make small talk about Ralph Waldo Emerson, and she looked up, unsmiling: “How did you, an American, find the Hoechst?” Why did she think I was an American? “Your yellow legal pad,” she said. “You only get those in America.” I explained I was here to study the Germany model.

Time Travelers Never Die
by Jack McDevitt
Published 10 Sep 2009

As David was leaving, the sheriff turned to the inventory officer and lowered his voice. “Any sign yet of Jay?” “Nothin’, Sheriff. I’ll let you know as soon as he shows up.” CHAPTER 13 Do not say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, LETTERS AND SOCIAL AIMS SHEL lost track of Dave. The victims, still choking on tear gas, lay broken and bleeding in the roadway. The crowd began to disperse. There were scattered voices, people saying they deserved it, maybe next time they’ll know better, got no choice. They wandered back into Selma.

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No matter what you saw up ahead, about me, I’ll always be here.” CHAPTER 26 There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR” IT would be an overstatement to say that Aspasia and her plays were getting substantial attention from the mass media. Sophocles was not exactly a subject to boost ratings, but the mystery surrounding the appearance of plays thought lost for two thousand years did interest a couple of the cable news show hosts.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

Taken as a whole, the evidence, including the video-gaming evidence, suggests it has the opposite effect. MEMORY IS THE GRAVITY OF MIND July 14, 2011 As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump, or flowing in waves. —Ralph Waldo Emerson A FASCINATING AND UNSETTLING study of the internet’s effects on memory has just come out in Science. It provides more evidence of how quickly our minds adapt to the tools we use to think with, for better and for worse. The study, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips,” was conducted by three psychologists: Betsy Sparrow, of Columbia; Jenny Liu, of the University of Wisconsin; and Daniel Wegner, of Harvard.

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Not only does it sound fusty and arcane, as if it had been extracted from the nether regions of a moldy physiology handbook, but it seems fatally tainted with political incorrectness. Only the rash or the drunken would dare launch the word into a conversation at a cocktail party. It wasn’t always a pariah. In an essay published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1858, Ralph Waldo Emerson chose the adjective to describe the experience of reading: “I find certain books vital and spermatic, not leaving the reader what he was.” For Emerson, the best books—the “true ones”—“take rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.”

The Road to Character
by David Brooks
Published 13 Apr 2015

He built his philosophy low to the ground, from reading history and literature and from direct observation—focusing relentlessly on what he would call “the living world.” As Paul Fussell observed, he confuted all determinism. He rejected the notion that behavior is shaped by impersonal iron forces. He always focused with his searing eye on the particularity of each individual. Ralph Waldo Emerson would later observe that “Souls are not saved in bundles.”16 Johnson fervently believed in each individual’s mysterious complexity and inherent dignity. He was, through it all, a moralist, in the best sense of that term. He believed that most problems are moral problems. “The happiness of society depends on virtue,” he would write.

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Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (Norton, 1986), 236. 11. Bate, Samuel Johnson, 218. 12. Meyers, Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, 114. 13. Meyers, Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, 2. 14. Fussell, Johnson and the Life of Writing, 163. 15. Fussell, Johnson and the Life of Writing, 51. 16. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Writings (Beacon, 2004), 216. 17. Fussell, Johnson and the Life of Writing, 147. 18. Percy Hazen Houston, Doctor Johnson: A Study in Eighteenth Century Humanism (Cambridge University Press, 1923), 195. 19. Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Other Press, 2010), 21. 20.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 1 Jan 2007

My contacts now know that I don’t respond to emergencies, so the emergencies somehow don’t exist or don’t come to me. Problems, as a rule, solve themselves or disappear if you remove yourself as an information bottleneck and empower others. Cultivating Selective Ignorance There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803–1882) From this point forward, I’m going to propose that you develop an uncanny ability to be selectively ignorant. Ignorance may be bliss, but it is also practical. It is imperative that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable.

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—RON POPEIL, founder of RONCO; responsible for more than $1 billion in sales of rotisserie chicken roasters As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON The Renaissance Minimalist Douglas Price was waking up to another beautiful summer morning in his Brooklyn brownstone. First things first: coffee. The jet lag was minor, considering he had just returned from a two-week jaunt through the islands of Croatia. It was just one of six countries he had visited in the last 12 months.

Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town
by Lamorna Ash
Published 1 Apr 2020

When she did come home, she would go straight down onto the beach. ‘I don’t know how to explain it,’ she says when I ask her what that return was like. ‘I felt relieved, like I could breathe again. It’s the stretching of the eyes; it’s looking out at the horizon again.’ ‘The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of the healing powers of nature. ‘We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.’ Mum and I continue walking purposefully along the beach, feeling ourselves open up, becoming more malleable, more forgiving of one another. Now and then we break from our conversation to acknowledge the extraordinary things the sea has done since we were last here: the jagged rocks by the estuary we had seen last spring have been hidden by a layer of sand, the shell line has been replenished and a large tree branch has been blown back by the wind so it arcs back into the sand as graceful as a dancer.

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For the Deep Scattering Layer, see the ship’s log of the USS Jasper, quoted in ‘Blue-sea thinking: technology is transforming the relationship between people and the oceans’, in The Economist Technology Quarterly, 10 March 2018. LOCAL For Synge, see The Aran Islands. For Woolf, see her diary of August 1905 in A Passionate Apprentice. For Plath, see ‘Ocean 1212-W’. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, see Nature (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1836). A FEAST OF SEABIRDS For Pam Lomax and Ron Hogg, see Newlyn Before the Artists Came (Penzance: Shears and Hogg Publications, 2010). For Sebald, see The Rings of Saturn. ROSEBUD I am grateful to Michael Sagar-Fenton, who lives in Penzance, for telling me the story of the Rosebud.

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary
by Sarah Ogilvie
Published 17 Oct 2023

Knight is the seventy-fourth-most cited author in the Dictionary, quoted more frequently than Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Eliot or Ralph Waldo Emerson (who comes in at 116, the next-most quoted American). American literature was not always read by Americans. Abraham Shackleton, a fifty-one-year-old secretary of a tram company (and, before that, a gasworks), living in Birkenhead, north-west England, sent in a total of 10,092 slips, most of which were from the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edward H. Knight. The works of Edgar Allan Poe were read by an Irishman living in Madras, India. Walt Whitman was read by an English vicar living in Leeds, the Revd John Cross.

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
by Andro Linklater
Published 12 Nov 2013

Aware that restive Northerners were opposed to a new Fugitive Slaves Act that required them to aid in the capture and return of an escaped slave, he bluntly demanded what right they had “as a question of morals and of conscience . . . to endeavor to get round this Constitution, or to embarrass the free exercise of the rights secured by the Constitution to the persons whose slaves escape from them?” The purpose of his speech was to defend the Union, but it did so, as Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out derisively, by treating “the Union as an estate, a large farm,” in effect as a property. Instead of giving priority to the sense of justice that, as John Locke argued, provided the basis of private property, Webster proposed that property itself was so sacred that an individual’s conscience should be sacrificed to the priority of protecting it.

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Walton, 14 Georgia 185 (1853). “property in persons”: Daniel Webster’s much-quoted speech in defense of the Union was delivered in the Senate March 7, 1850. Emerson’s response came in a lecture, “The Fugitive Slave Law,” delivered in the Tabernacle, New York City, March 7, 1854. The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 12 vols. (Fireside Edition. Boston and New York: 1909), http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1961&chapter=123098&layout=html&Itemid=27. “We have a right of protection”: Senator Albert Brown’s speech quoted in A People & a Nation: A History of the United States by Mary Beth Norton et al.

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Elman, Benjamin A. On Their Own Terms: Science in China 1550–1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Elton, G. R. England Under the Tudors. London: Methuen, 1974. Elvin, Mark. The Pattern of the Chinese Past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 12 vols. Fireside Edition, Vol XI. Boston and New York, 1909. http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1961&chapter=123098&layout=html&Itemid=27. Emmons, Terence. The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
by William Cronon
Published 2 Nov 2009

One visitor in 1848 noted that “on the outskirts of the town . . . the highways were impassible, except in winter when frozen, or in summer when dry and pulverized into the finest and most penetrating of dust. At all other seasons they were little less than quagmires.”7 Horses had to struggle knee-deep in mud and water, so it could take a day to travel less than a dozen miles.8 Conditions like these were a trial for even the most leisurely travelers. When Ralph Waldo Emerson visited Chicago in the winter of 1853, he began to wonder whether he should have made the trip at all. “In the prairie,” he wrote, “it rains, & thaws incessantly, &, if we step off the short street, we go up to the shoulders, perhaps, in mud. . . .”9 All places in the region suffered these seasonal inconveniences to some degree, but mud was an especially serious problem in Chicago for reasons dating back to the Ice Age.

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Although the second sentence tries to cover the earlier reference to laborers by generalizing to the apparently more collective “men,” the bias of the first sentence remains: wild nature was less an unpeopled landscape than an unworked one, and the “poet’s” relationship to it was intrinsically that of a leisured class. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature in Essays and Lectures (1983), 42; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973). 14.Garland, Rose of Dutcher’s Cooley, 183. 15.Charles Dudley Warner, Studies in the South and West with Comments on Canada (1889), 185. 16.Waldo Frank, Our America (1919), 117. Later, on p. 120, Frank wrote of the Chicago stockyards that “Dante would have recognized this world.

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Aside from the inherent dangers to ships of winter storms on the lakes, the critical locations where ice closed the shipping lanes were the Erie Canal and the Straits of Mackinac. Cf. Chicago Building & Loan Association, Statistical and Historical Review of Chicago, 37. 7.Peyton, Over the Alleghanies, 327. 8.Cleaver, History of Chicago, 80. 9.The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (1939), 4:342. 10.Hough, “Prehistoric Great Lakes,” 84–109; and Hough, Geology of the Great Lakes. 11.Carter, “Facts and Incidents,” 40. For other descriptions of the problems Chicagoans experienced with mud, see Charles Cleaver, Early-Chicago Reminiscences, Fergus Historical Series, no. 19 (1882), 28–31.

Simple Matters: Living With Less and Ending Up With More
by Erin Boyle
Published 12 Jan 2016

They have likened what he did at the edge of the woods in Concord to a young child packing a bandanna, tying it to a stick, and running away . . . to the end of the driveway. Yes, Thoreau went to the woods to find the essentials. But when he was wanting for creature comforts, he did not hesitate to make a beeline for his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dining table, smack in the center of town. A single stem of forced cherry blossoms acts as a simple bit of decoration on a wooden crate. I don’t find this inconsistency troubling, nor hypocritical. I find it encouraging. We can, each of us, seek out a simpler mode of doing things. We can do so without abandoning our life as we know it.

How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World: A Handbook for Personal Liberty
by Harry Browne
Published 1 Jan 1973

The others are unimportant to your future—if your future is to be free. There's a beautiful world out there. Why clutter it up with relationships that don't belong in your life? It's an easy life. Why complicate it by trying to be all things to all people? Adopt the image that's most effective—your own. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON 18 Freedom from Bad Relationships WE'VE SEEN THAT IT'S FOOLISH to waste time trying to deal with incompatible people. There are plenty of people around who would want you to be as you are. That doesn't mean, however, that you're likely to find individuals with whom you'll be 100% compatible—with the exact same tastes, values, attitudes, and ideas that you have.

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Freedom from exploitation is perhaps the easiest freedom to get. All you have to do is to stop participating in any relationship—of any kind—that doesn't suit you. It is as impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself, as for a thing to be, and not to be, at the same time. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON 25 Freedom from the Treadmill FREEDOM IS living your life as you want to live it. Many people feel that freedom is impossible because of the many hours required for work, because of their debts, and because they can't afford to live the way they'd like to. The treadmill enslaves many people who can't conceive that life could be any different.

Hopes and Prospects
by Noam Chomsky
Published 1 Jan 2009

As the national poet Walt Whitman explained, our conquests “take off the shackles that prevent men the even chance of being happy and good.” With the conquest of half of Mexico in mind, he asked rhetorically, “What has miserable, inefficient Mexico…to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?” His thoughts were spelled out by the leading humanist thinker of the period, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote that the annexation of Texas was simply a matter of course: “It is very certain that the strong British race which has now overrun much of this continent, must also overrun that trace, and Mexico and Oregon also, and it will in the course of ages be of small import by what particular occasions and methods it was done.”

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Bush and, 144 Hezbollah and, 144, 146–47 Israel’s 2006 invasion of, 146, 153, 250 Obama and, 144, 250 Levinson, Charles, 202 Levy, Gideon, 202 Lewis, Anthony, 124–25, 274–75 Liberal Illiberalism, U.S., 40–42 Liberia, 7 Lieberman, Avigdor, 156 limited liability, 30 Lippmann, Walter, 47, 122, 136 Lissakers, Karen, 72 Livni, Tzipi, 157 Llorens, Hugo, 67 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 22 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 70 Lynd, Staughton, 96 Ma’aleh Adumim, 180, 188 Madison, James, 18, 233 Mafia doctrine, 55 Maguire, Mairead Corrigan, 148 Maliki, Nouri al-, 239 Mandela, Nelson, 267 MANTECH (manufacturing technology), 88 Maoz, Zeev, 170 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 5 Mauritius, 168 Mayr, Ernst, 175 McCain, John, 209, 212 McCoy, Alfred, 203, 262 McFaul, Michael, 65 McGlynn, John, 174–75 Medicare, 227 Meir, Golda, 195 Mercosur, 70 Merkel, Angela, 270 Meron, Theodor, 148 Meshal, Khaled, 153 Mexican-U.S. border, 28–29, 31, 270 Mexico, 29, 31, 49, 60, 70, 90 “American invasion” of, 160 NAFTA and, 29, 35–36, 215–16, 270 Ralph Waldo Emerson on, 17 Walt Whitman on, 16 Meyers, Steven Lee, 154 Michael, B., 154 military, U.S., 62–63 military spending, 63–65, 84–85 Mill, John Stuart, 267 missile defense programs, 65, 86, 199. See also ballistic missile defense (BMD) programs Mitchell, George, 251, 255, 256 Monning, Bill, 66 monopolies, 77, 86–90 Monroe, James, 19 Monroe Doctrine, 53, 54 Morales, Evo, 59–60, 70–71, 115, 213 Morgan, Edmund, 18–19 Morgenson, Gretchen, 113 Morgenthau, Hans, 21, 39–40 Morris, Benny, 154 Mubarak, Hosni, 191, 192 Multi-National Force-Iraq, 130 Nairn, Alan, 224, 260–61 Najibullah, Mohammad, 245 narcoterrorism, 57.

For Profit: A History of Corporations
by William Magnuson
Published 8 Nov 2022

“Evidently to annoy, they obliged us to take a caboose car, hitched on to a freight train stationed at least one fourth of a mile from the depot, where we were crowded together like cattle, and to which they obliged the passengers—men, women and children—to walk and transport their own baggage, after charging extra for all over twenty-five pounds of baggage, and even weighing blankets and overcoats.”27 Despite the discomfort, the railroad proved a great spur to trade and commerce. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Railroad iron is a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.” The railroad helped ferry crops and minerals east from California and manufactured goods west from the East Coast. And the effects were not limited to just the direct east-west route of the initial railroad.

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Stanley, My Early Travels and Adventures in America and Asia 165–66. 26. Federal Coordinator of Transportation, Public Aids to Transportation, Vol. 1 110 (1940); Josiah Bushnell Grinnell, Men and Events of Forty Years 86 (1891). 27. The Congressional Globe, Vol. 41 536 (1869). 28. The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 2 293 (1901); Martin W. Sandler, Iron Rails, Iron Men, and the Race to Link the Nation 176 (2015); Annual Report of the Auditor of Railway Accounts for the Year Ending June 30, 1889 322 (1880). 29. North American Review, Vol. 108 145 (1869). 30. Robert T. Swaine, The Cravath Firm and Its Predecessors 158 (2007). 31.

The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London
by Judith Flanders
Published 14 Oct 2012

And I said, without the least conceit…“it really is a pleasure to work with you, you receive the impression so nicely”.’10 Whilst these impressions were real, they were also radically reworked by Dickens’ imagination to create new realities, well recognized by his fellow artists. Henry James described Dickens’ type of fiction, with its real places and real street names, as having the ‘solidity of specification’; Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of Dickens’ ‘London tracts’. So real were these tracts that when the American historian Francis Parkman arrived in London, ‘I thought I had been there before. There, in flesh and blood, was the whole host of characters that figured’ in Dickens – the people, the traffic: everything, he marvelled.

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Wills, 24 September 1858, Letters, vol. 8, p. 669; footnote: I owe this idea to Tambling, Going Astray, pp. 21–2. ‘he marvelled’: Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, 1884, cited in F. O. Matthiesson, The James Family (New York, Knopf, 1947), p. 360; ‘English Traits’, in Emerson, The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870), vol. 2, p. 278; Parkman, The Journals of Francis Parkman, ed. Mason Wade (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1949), vol. 1, p. 221. ‘created Dickens’: J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1959), p. 138; Walter Benjamin citing G.

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(London, Sherwood, Neely, & Jones, 1821) Elmes, James, Metropolitan Improvements; or, London in the Nineteenth Century ... (London, Jones & Co., 1829) Elson, George, The Last of the Climbing Boys: An Autobiography (London, John Long, 1900) Emerson, Ralph Waldo, ‘English Traits’, in The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870) Every Night Book; or, Life After Dark, ‘by the author of “The Cigar”’ (London, T. Richardson, 1828) The Flash Chaunter ... now singing at Offley’s, Cider Cellers [sic], Coal Hole, &c ... . (first published c.1834; London, W. West [?1865]) Fletcher, Hanslip, London Passed and Passing: A Pictorial Record of Destroyed and Threatened Buildings (London, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1908) Forbes, Mrs E.

The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting
by Anne Trubek
Published 5 Sep 2016

Spencer’s way of making letters became so popular because he imbued his letters with moral and spiritual valences that elevated his system above mere practicality. He used Lake Erie as the basis, so the “true imagery of writing is culled then from the sublime and beautiful in nature.” Living during the age of American Transcendentalism—the movement led by writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau—Spencer was inspired by nature. He fashioned a’s, b’s, and c’s from the shapes of rocks, branches, and lakes that he looked at every day. The inspiration for his ovals thus came from stone, the branches suggested the linking between letters, and waves lapping on the shore the downstrokes.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Published 15 Sep 2014

Every company starts in unique circumstances, and every company starts only once. Statistics doesn’t work when the sample size is one. From the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century, luck was something to be mastered, dominated, and controlled; everyone agreed that you should do what you could, not focus on what you couldn’t. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this ethos when he wrote: “Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances.… Strong men believe in cause and effect.” In 1912, after he became the first explorer to reach the South Pole, Roald Amundsen wrote: “Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck, people call it.”

The Website Investor: The Guide to Buying an Online Website Business for Passive Income
by Jeff Hunt
Published 17 Nov 2014

They understand the importance of certain metrics that are specific to websites, like traffic statistics, conversion rates, email open rates, and earnings per page view. They also understand revenue models that are frequently used by websites (such as pay per action, pay per click, subscriptions, etc.) and typical expenses and operational concerns. “No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson Dealing with a broker can sometimes be easier than communicating directly with a seller because brokers fundamentally understand what information is important to the buyer of a website. They can also assist you in the sales contract, escrow, and the transition process after there is agreement on price.

A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919
by Claire Hartfield
Published 1 Jan 2017

As the Defender observed, the rage didn’t blow in out of nowhere that day on the beach: “For years [America] has been sowing the wind and now she is reaping the whirlwind.” PART TWO FIRST WHISPERS Chicago skyline. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none hut he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” THREE Freedom Fight EUGENE WILLIAMS’S MOTHER BURIED her son a few days later, some seventeen years after she had brought him into the world one spring day in Georgia. When the family moved up north, Eugene had found that some of the other children at his school had roots in New York or Philadelphia or had been born right there in Chicago.

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
by Jonathan Haidt
Published 26 Dec 2005

E l i a d e , M. ( 1 9 5 9 / 1 9 5 7 ) . The sacred and the profane: The nature of religion, (W. R. Task, Trans.). San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace. Emerson, R. W. (1960a/1838). The divinity school address. In S. Whicher (Ed.), Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson ( p p . 100—1 16). B o s t o n : H o u g h t o n Mifflin. Emerson, R. W. (1960b/1838). Nature. In S. Whicher (Ed.), Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson (pp. 21—56). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. E m m o n s , R. A. ( 1 9 9 9 ) . The psychology of ultimate ccmcems: Motivation and spirituality in personality. Ne w York: Guilford. Emmons, R. A. (2003). Personal goals, life meaning, and virtue: Wellsprings of a positive life.

Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis
by Robert D. Putnam
Published 10 Mar 2015

The specific responses we have pursued to successfully overcome these challenges and restore opportunity have varied in detail, but underlying them all was a commitment to invest in other people’s children. And underlying that commitment was a deeper sense that those kids, too, were our kids. Not all Americans have shared that sense of communal obligation. In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Boston Brahmin Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.”70 Emerson spoke eloquently for the individualist tradition in America.

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Demography 42 (February 2005): 51–73; Jens Ludwig, Brian Jacob, Greg Duncan, James Rosenbaum, and Michael Johnson, “Neighborhood Effects on Low-Income Families: Evidence from a Housing-Voucher Lottery in Chicago” (working paper, University of Chicago, 2010); Jennifer Darrah and Stefanie DeLuca, “ ‘Living Here Has Changed My Whole Perspective’: How Escaping Inner-City Poverty Shapes Neighborhood and Housing Choice,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 33 (Spring 2014): 350–84. 70. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Essays: First Series (1841). Thanks to Thomas Spragens for alerting me to this passage. 71. Yvonne Abraham, “Doing Right by the Children in Chelsea,” Boston Globe, August 31, 2014. The Stories of Our Kids 1. Some quotations have been lightly edited to remove interjections, false starts, and repetition.

A People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn
Published 2 Jan 1977

The Senate, including northerners who had once spoken for the Indian, ratified it, yielding, as Senator Edward Everett of Massachusetts said, to “the force of circumstances . . . the hard necessity.” Now the Georgia whites stepped up their attacks to speed the removal. The government did not move immediately against the Cherokees. In April 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed an open letter to President Van Buren, referring with indignation to the removal treaty with the Cherokees (signed behind the backs of an overwhelming majority of them) and asked what had happened to the sense of justice in America: The soul of man, the justice, the mercy that is the heart’s heart in all men, from Maine to Georgia, does abhor this business . . . a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude, a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country any more?

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A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers . . . marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. His friend and fellow writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, agreed, but thought it futile to protest. When Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, “What are you doing in there?” it was reported that Thoreau replied, “What are you doing out there?” The churches, for the most part, were either outspokenly for the war or timidly silent. Generally, no one but the Congregational, Quaker, and Unitarian churches spoke clearly against the war.

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While insisting that the raid was too hopelessly and ridiculously small to accomplish anything . . . the state nevertheless spent $250,000 to punish the invaders, stationed from one to three thousand soldiers in the vicinity and threw the nation into turmoil. In John Brown’s last written statement, in prison, before he was hanged, he said: “I, John Brown, am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, not an activist himself, said of the execution of John Brown: “He will make the gallows holy as the cross.” Of the twenty-two men in John Brown’s striking force, five were black. Two of these were killed on the spot, one escaped, and two were hanged by the authorities. Before his execution, John Copeland wrote to his parents: Remember that if I must die I die in trying to liberate a few of my poor and oppressed people from my condition of servitude which God in his Holy Writ has hurled his most bitter denunciations against. . . .

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel
by Rolf Potts
Published 24 Dec 2002

Sierra Club founder John Muir (an ur-vagabonder if there ever was one) used to express amazement at the well-heeled travelers who would visit Yosemite only to rush away after a few hours of sightseeing. Muir called these folks the “time-poor” — people who were so obsessed with tending their material wealth and social standing that they couldn’t spare the time to truly experience the splendor of California’s Sierra wilderness. One of Muir’s Yosemite visitors in the summer of 1871 was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who gushed upon seeing the sequoias, “It’s a wonder that we can see these trees and not wonder more.” When Emerson scurried off a couple hours later, however, Muir speculated wryly about whether the famous transcendentalist had really seen the trees in the first place. Nearly a century later, naturalist Edwin Way Teale used Muir’s example to lament the frenetic pace of modern society.

Because We Say So
by Noam Chomsky

In short, when they have the opportunity, “the Masters of Mankind” pursue their “vile maxim . . . all for ourselves and nothing for other people,” as Adam Smith explained long ago. Mass public education is one of the great achievements of American society. It has had many dimensions. One purpose was to prepare independent farmers for life as wage laborers who would tolerate what they regarded as virtual slavery. The coercive element did not pass without notice. Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that political leaders call for popular education because they fear that “This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats.” But educated the right way: Limit their perspectives and understanding, discourage free and independent thought, and train them for obedience.

Capital Allocators: How the World’s Elite Money Managers Lead and Invest
by Ted Seides
Published 23 Mar 2021

” – Khe Hy “As an investor and entrepreneur, everything takes longer and is harder than you thought it would be at the outset.” – Dan Rasmussen “If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” – Donna Snider “Change isn’t that bad if you’re the one doing it.” – Jeff Solomon “From Ralph Waldo Emerson, life is a succession of lessons that must be lived to be understood.” – Jordi Visser What matters most Keeping work in perspective makes it all worthwhile. “All of the great wisdoms are really true: Don’t sweat the small stuff; Spend time with those you love; Find your balance; Most people spend a lot less time thinking about you than you think they do

The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy
by Richard Shotton
Published 12 Feb 2018

The most literal is to invest as much time and effort on your brand’s physical presentation as your product. Otherwise there’s a danger that products won’t be appreciated as much as they could be. Unfortunately, there’s a mechanistic mindset which is deeply suspicious of presentation as a source of value. It is best reflected in the Ralph Waldo Emerson’s supposed dismissal of such fripperies: If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbour, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door. Not true. Far better to listen to Ludwig von Mises, the leading figure in the Austrian School of economics, who said, “If you run a restaurant there is no healthy distinction to be made between the value you create by cooking the food, and the value you create by sweeping the floor”. 2.

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis
by Anatole Kaletsky
Published 22 Jun 2010

Bush but also Gordon Brown, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner—so slow to acknowledge the need for government intervention? A large part of the explanation can be found in the sad state of modern economic theory, the subject to which we now turn. CHAPTER ELEVEN There Is No Can Opener A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. —Ralph Waldo Emerson AN ECONOMIST, a chemist, and a physicist are marooned on a desert island. Their only food is a can of beans, but they have no can opener. What are they to do? The physicist says: “Let’s try and focus the tropical sun onto the lid—it might melt a hole.” “No,” says the chemist. “We should first pour salt water on the lid—maybe that will rust it.”

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The bankers and regulators whose faith in efficient markets almost wrecked the global financial system might then have heeded Keynes’s famous dictum: “When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.” Or suppose that rational expectations had been renamed internally consistent expectations, as some of its proponents originally suggested. An adequate refutation might then have been Ralph Waldo Emerson’s acerbic comment that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” To continue this thought experiment, try replacing perfect competition with ruthless exploitation, general equilibrium with timeless stasis, Pareto Optimality with Entrenched Privilege, Ricardian Equivalence with Barro’s False Assumption, natural rate of unemployment with deliberate job destruction, and so on.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt
Published 13 Mar 2012

Even if you doubt that the switch is a group-level adaptation, I hope you’ll agree with me that the switch exists, and that it generally makes people less selfish and more loving. Here are three examples of switch flipping that you might have experienced yourself. 1. Awe in Nature In the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a set of lectures on nature that formed the foundation of American Transcendentalism, a movement that rejected the analytic hyperintellectualism of America’s top universities. Emerson argued that the deepest truths must be known by intuition, not reason, and that experiences of awe in nature were among the best ways to trigger such intuitions.

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San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace. Ellis, J. J. 1996. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Vintage. Ellsworth, P. C., and C. A. Smith. 1985. “Patterns of Cognitive Appraisal in Emotion.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 48:813–38. Emerson, R. W. 1960/1838. “Nature.” In Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. S. Whicher, 21–56. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Eskine, K. J., N. A. Kacinic, and J. J. Prinz. 2011. “A Bad Taste in the Mouth: Gustatory Influences on Moral Judgment.” Psychological Science 22:295–99. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1976. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
by Victor Davis Hanson
Published 15 Nov 2021

Native customs and traditions, while tolerated in civil society, within two or three generations were forgotten, to be replaced by American versions often quite alien to those of the immigrant’s birthplace. The ideal was that a citizen was to be defined by his values, not just by his birth and not at all by his creed or color. So the mid-nineteenth-century essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson waxed about the novel American citizen in a now often-caricatured display of supposed naïveté if not cultural chauvinism: “The energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes—of the Africans, and of the Polynesians—will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages, or that which earlier emerged from the Pelasgic and Etruscan barbarism.”1 In the most brutal of bargains, America and the immigrant took risks.

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Busiest border crossing in the world: Preeti Varathan, “The Busiest Land Border Crossing in the World Is Closed This Weekend,” Quartz, September 22, 2017, https://qz.com/1085125/san-ysidro-the-busiest-land-border-crossing-in-the-world-connecting-mexico-to-the-us-is-closed-from-sept-23-25. Chapter Two: Residents 1. Emerson, journal entry, 1845, first published 1912 in Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson with Annotations, Vol. IX, 119; cf. the now standard critique of such nineteenth-century melting-pot confidence as proof of white racism in Heike Paul, The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies (Bielefield, Germany: Transcript Verlag, 2014), 264. See also Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Papers Nos. 6 and 7. 2.

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
by Alain de Botton
Published 6 Mar 2012

In the preface to a volume of his collected sermons, John Wesley explained and defended his adherence to simplicity: ‘I design plain truth for plain people: therefore … I abstain from all nice and philosophical speculations; from all perplexed and intricate reasonings; and, as far as possible, from even the show of learning. My design is … to forget all that ever I have read in my life.’ A handful of brave secular writers have been able to express themselves with a similarly inspiring openness, among the most notable being Donald Winnicott in the field of psychoanalysis and Ralph Waldo Emerson in literature. But these characters have been regrettably few in number, and most have also drawn upon a religious background to mould and buttress their sensibilities (Winnicott began as a Methodist, Emerson as a Transcendentalist). The greatest Christian preachers have been vulgar in the very best sense.

The Rich and the Rest of Us
by Tavis Smiley
Published 15 Feb 2012

Within the bosom of the Black prophetic tradition, liberation theology, and social justice advocacy, righteous indignation toward poverty is now given moral license to explode. These traditions demand that we reject violence but welcome public outrage at corporate and societal greed. As the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds, “A good indignation brings out all one’s powers.” We are steadfast in our belief that the legacy of social justice remains the last hope for American democracy. PRISONS AND THE POOR “… For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage
by Roger L. Martin
Published 15 Feb 2009

Why You’ve Never Heard of Charles Sanders Peirce by Jennifer Riel Bertrand Russell called him “beyond doubt … one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever.” 4 So why is Charles Sanders Peirce at best an obscure footnote, while other nineteenth-century American philosophers like William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau are still widely read today? Peirce has been characterized as a prickly misanthrope, which may help explain his low profile. He acknowledged it himself, contrasting his own personality with that of his friend William James: “He is so concrete, so living; I a mere table of contents, so abstract, a very snarl of twine.” 5 Many intellectuals have had cranky dispositions, yet have gone on to great acclaim.

Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think
by Luke Johnson
Published 31 Aug 2011

Exponential growth is always the magic ingredient, be it the dotcom boom, China or alternative energy. Of course, some of these new fads will turn out to be genuine opportunities, but that does not mean that you can make money out of them, especially if promoters have intermediated matters and taken the best profits. ‘Do your thing and I shall know you’ Ralph Waldo Emerson So if you are picking a business partner, hiring a head of sales, or choosing a franchise formula – dig beneath the surface. Do not be taken in by froth – ask the tough questions, and be honest with yourself. Does the idea have staying power? Does your prospective partner get his or her hands dirty?

How to Hygge: The Secrets of Nordic Living
by Signe Johansen
Published 19 Oct 2016

A spritz of this cool, fresh scent is more than an olfactory joy; it’s a vital part of my connection with nature and part of a sensory map that reflects my own particular narrative in life. You will no doubt have sensory experiences that trigger a similar response, and I bet for many of you who spent time outdoors as children, teenagers and into adulthood, some of those scents will be deeply imprinted on your sensory DNA. Setting the Pace To echo Ralph Waldo Emerson, nature sets the pace across the Nordic region and ‘her secret is patience’. Everything that is compelling and vital about the Nordic countries, be it our food culture(s), great design, architecture, arguably even our social democratic traditions, is in some way grounded in a deep respect for nature and the elements.

Operation Lighthouse: Reflections on Our Family's Devastating Story of Coercive Control and Domestic Homicide
by Luke Hart and Ryan Hart
Published 15 Jul 2018

Domestic abuse is very much something people don’t wish to see or hear about. People would rather if it stayed at home, behind closed doors. Those of us who have experienced its effects need to speak up so that it becomes normal for domestic abuse not to occur, not simply that we don’t hear about it. 5 Overcoming We acquire the strength we overcome Ralph Waldo Emerson Sinking Feeling From an external appearance, not only would we have seemed to be three children doing OK, we were actively succeeding in many areas of our life. At the time this appeared to be from harmless motivation and industriousness. Yet, we harboured a deep fear inside. As children, we were blind to our strengths and weaknesses and we looked for validation of these from the external world.

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom
by Tony Robbins
Published 18 Nov 2014

I wanted to know about anything that could immediately change the quality of my life and anyone else’s. But the books I read as a child made the deepest impression. They were my ticket out of a world of pain: a world with no compelling future. They transported me to a realm of limitless possibilities. I can remember Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on self-reliance, and the lines “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion.” Another was a book by the philosopher James Allen, As a Man Thinketh, echoing the biblical proverb “As a man thinketh, so his heart will be.”

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If you’re looking for guidance on this, experts say you should plan to save at least a minimum of 10% of your income, although in today’s economy many agree 15% is a far better number, especially if you’re over the age of 40. (You’ll find out why in section 3!) Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce? —RALPH WALDO EMERSON By now you might be saying, “This all sounds great in theory, Tony, but I’m spread thin enough as it is! Every penny is accounted for.” And you wouldn’t be alone. Most people don’t think they can afford to save. But frankly, we can’t afford not to save. Believe me, all of us can find that extra money if we really have to have it right now for a real emergency!

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When your brain knows a real number, your conscious mind will figure out a way to get there. You now know the income you need to be financially secure, vital, and independent. So let’s see what happens when your dreams get bigger. Dare to live the dreams you have dreamed for yourself. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON Let me tell you the story of Ron and Michelle, a couple I met at one of the seminars I hold every year at my resort in Fiji. They were in their mid-30s, with two small children. Successful people, they owned a small business in Colorado. Ron was great at running their business, but neither of them paid attention to their household finances.

Ego Is the Enemy
by Ryan Holiday
Published 13 Jun 2016

Whether you built your empire from nothing or inherited it, whether your wealth is financial or merely a cultivated talent, entropy is seeking to destroy it as you read this. Can you handle success? Or will it be the worst thing that ever happened to you? ALWAYS STAY A STUDENT Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON The legend of Genghis Khan has echoed through history: A barbarian conqueror, fueled by bloodlust, terrorizing the civilized world. We have him and his Mongol horde traveling across Asia and Europe, insatiable, stopping at nothing to plunder, rape, and kill not just the people who stood in their way, but the cultures they had built.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
by Alain de Botton
Published 1 Apr 2009

As a result, a sympathetic response to an electricity pylon remained for most of us a haphazard and unsupported impulse, an epiphany which might last for a minute on a drive along a motorway or on a walk along a moor, but to which no prestige could be attached and from which little of merit could emerge. In an essay entitled ‘The Poet’, published in 1844, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented the narrow definition of beauty subscribed to by his peers, who tended to reserve the term exclusively for the bucolic landscapes and unspoilt pastoral scenes celebrated in the works of well-known artists and poets of the past. Emerson himself, however, writing at the dawn of the industrial age, observing with interest the proliferation of railways, warehouses, canals and factories, wished to make room for the possibility of alternative forms of beauty.

Designing for the Social Web
by Joshua Porter
Published 18 May 2008

That kids tend to intuitively grasp and embrace the social nature of the experience is a strong predictor of this future. 18 http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm 21 2 A Framework for Social Web Design The AOF method for making early and crucial design decisions “ It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson If there is one disease that affects nearly all design projects, it’s feature creep. It is the deadly affliction in which design teams gradually add feature after feature, like straws on a camel’s back, until they ultimately overload their interface and make the software difficult to use. Feature creep happens when there is a lack of sustained focus on what’s most important.

Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction
by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd
Published 15 Jan 2013

Kidder was trying to cajole me into a piece of work, and he cited Keats’s advice to Shelley on avoiding excesses: “Curb your magnanimity,” wrote the tactful Keats. I had the opposite problem, in Kidder’s view: stinginess. He was trying to make me flesh out a typically underdone paragraph of mine. “Unleash your magnanimity,” he said. Oh brother. It had come to this. One had heard oneself. NOTES ON USAGE In 1859 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Never use the word development. Dangerous words in like kind are display, improvement, peruse, circumstances …” Those words have survived the great man’s scorn—though he was probably right about “peruse.” Every generation has its verbal fashions and critics who deplore them. Some usages, seemingly poisonous, get absorbed harmlessly into the language; others die out.

Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Live Your Dreams, Ignite Your Passions and Run Your Business From Anywhere in the World
by Jesse Krieger
Published 2 Jun 2014

However to get there, you must carry out the Actions that comprise your business as this is the execution of your vision and mission statements and the core of becoming a Lifestyle Entrepreneur. Once the Planning is Done, You Must Spring Into… ACTION “I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.” — Leonardo da Vinci “The Ancestor of Every Action is a Thought.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson Take Action On Your Mission to Realize Your Vision This is where the rubber meets the road. Vision and Mission describe your business in conceptual, abstract terms, the Actions and Product components of the V-MAP Framework are tactical and action-oriented. The second half of this book is primarily Actions and Product focused.

Masters of Mankind
by Noam Chomsky
Published 1 Sep 2014

Withness takes us beyond personal interest, accepting the risks of the other when there is no “pragmatic” reason to do so. Withness is an instrument of awareness that helps us to know where and who we are, for it locates ourselves with others, and asks through example that others relocate and reorder themselves. When Henry David Thoreau, protesting the poll tax, was asked by Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Henry, why are you here?” Thoreau responded, “Waldo, why are you not here?”3 There was no need for Chomsky to commit civil disobedience during the Indochina war except as a citizen responsibility. It was his statement of withness responsibility with the unseen Other. Our government could not respond to the anguish of millions; its policy makers were the chief culprits.

Taming the To-Do List: How to Choose Your Best Work Every Day
by Glynnis Whitwer
Published 10 Aug 2015

To begin to master your workload and goals, try to identify what false reasons might be hindering you. Myths I tell myself . . . About my regular task: About my personal goal: 6 * * * Overcoming Our Fears A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer. Ralph Waldo Emerson My elementary school campus was divided between lower and upper grades. First through fourth composed the lower grades, and fifth through eighth the upper grades. Not only was there an age difference but the upper grades also had separate buildings and a separate playground, rotated between classes, and ate a later lunch.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner
Published 31 Aug 2006

Fuller made his name designing futuristic technologies such as the threewheeled Dymaxion car and, most famously, the geodesic dome, but the roots of his interests reached deep into America’s pre-industrial past. Born in 1895, Fuller was the latest in a long line of Unitarian ministers, lawyers, and writers. His great-aunt, Margaret Fuller, had joined Ralph Waldo Emerson to cofound the Dial, the preeminent literary journal of American Transcendentalism and the first magazine to publish Henry David Thoreau. Margaret served as an intellectual model for the young Buckminster. “When I heard that Aunt Margaret said, ‘I must start with the universe and work down to the parts, I must have an understanding of it,’ that became a great drive for me,” he recalled.26 For the Transcendentalists, as later for Fuller himself, the material world could be imagined as a series of corresponding forms, each linked to every other according to invisible but omnipresent principles.

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Perhaps he is both a citizen of the earth and, as a packet of informational [ 86 ] Chapter 3 patterns, its emblem too, just as he is both a reader of the Whole Earth Catalog (a system of tools) and, potentially, a tool for others in his own right. In this dizzying string of analogies, we can hear echoes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Norbert Wiener, and, of course, Buckminster Fuller. But for many of the readers of the Whole Earth Catalog, the analogies were more than the stuff of Romantic or cybernetic theory. They could be lived. In keeping with Brand’s statement of its purpose, and with the collective ambitions of the New Communalists, the Catalog’s structure and rhetorical strategies worked to shape an imagined reader who was a visionary, with a view of the planet’s condition, and a local actor, with the ability to shape the larger world by shaping his local surroundings.

A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America
by Tony Horwitz
Published 1 Jan 2008

His revised world map had “America” engraved next to a landmass roughly resembling Brazil. Waldseemüller later changed his mind and dropped the name from a subsequent edition. But “America” was reprised in 1538 by the great cartographer Gerard Mercator, who applied it to continents both north and south. “Strange,” lamented Ralph Waldo Emerson, “that broad America must wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickledealer at Seville, who . . . managed in this lying world to supplant Columbus and baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name.” AFTER SEVERAL DAYS in Santo Domingo, I met a museum guide named Carlos who taught English as his second job and agreed to take on a third, as my translator.

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Americans started visiting the town, drawn by its warm climate and exoticism. Mostly Protestant New Englanders, they were shocked and titillated by St. Augustine’s “popery,” describing masked carnivals and a Good Friday custom known as “shooting the Jews,” when locals hung effigies and peppered them with bullets. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who traveled to St. Augustine in 1827 to recover from tuberculosis, was one of many who relished the city’s “dim vestiges of a romantic past” and ancient stones redolent of “a thousand heavy histories.” Hucksters quickly learned to trade on this nostalgia by wreathing the city in hoary fictions.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

Housman’s lament for a “land of lost content” echoes in the anxieties of ambivalent urbanites in cities across the world. It glows on television in the image of a little house on the American prairie or in BBC manor-house comedies celebrating quaint country squires and their seductively simple-minded rural shenanigans. We know, writes Ralph Waldo Emerson, when seen in the streets of cities, how great are the stars above.1 We know, when imagined from the London underground, how verdant are the Devon hedgerows. And we know too, when imagined from gleaming towers set down in the sands of the bleached Dubai desert, how poignant are the longings of a Bangladeshi migrant worker for the rippling greenery of a faraway riverbank village.

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Michael Bloomberg of New York 1. Gabriel Sherman, “The Mayor of Mayors,” New York Magazine, June 11, 2012. 2. Sridhar Pappu, “What’s Next for Michael Bloomberg,” Fastcompany, August 8, 2011, http://www.fastcompany.com/1769004/whats-next-michael-bloomberg. Chapter 2. The Land of Lost Content 1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature [1836], in Nature/Walking, ed. John Elder, Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, p. 6. 2. Michael Lesy, Wisconsin Death Trip, New York: Pantheon Books, 1973. 3. In novels like Far from the Madding Crowd and Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy could be both endearing and caustic about rural life in England, but writers like Laurie Lee (Cider with Rosie) and John Betjeman captured the romance of the English countryside without ambivalence in their poetry.

Status Anxiety
by Alain de Botton
Published 1 Jan 2004

Many of Napoleon’s leading appointees came from modest backgrounds, among them his prefects at the Ministry of the Interior, his scientific advisers and a number of senators. In Napoleon’s words, hereditary nobles were “the curse of the nation, imbeciles and hereditary asses!” Even after his fall, Napolean’s ideas endured and won over influential proponents in Europe and the United States. Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed a desire to see “every man placed where he belongs, with so much power confided to him as he would carry and use.” Thomas Carlyle, for his part, was outraged by the way the children of the rich squandered their money while those of the poor were denied even a rudimentary education: “What shall we say of the Idle Aristocracy, the owners of the soil of England; whose recognised function is that of handsomely consuming the rents of England and shooting the partridges of England?”

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea
by Mark Kurlansky
Published 7 Apr 2008

In the early 1820s a Pennsylvania Peace Society was led not by a Quaker, but by Henry Holcombe, another veteran of the American Revolution. In 1828 an umbrella group was formed to unite all the peace societies, called the American Peace Society. Peace societies became an important intellectual force in nineteenth-century America, attracting speakers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who believed that humankind went to war because it was backward and undeveloped and that it would eventually abandon such practices. As time distanced America from its founding experience, more and more Americans dared to speak out against the official version of the Revolutionary War. In 1839, Charles K.

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success
by William Thorndike
Published 14 Sep 2012

By this standard, both Buffett and Singleton intentionally ran highly unusual restaurants that over time attracted like-minded, long-term-oriented customer/shareholders. CHAPTER 3 The Turnaround Bill Anders and General Dynamics A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. —Ralph Waldo Emerson In 1989, after nearly thirty years as the international symbol of Cold War tension and anxiety, the Berlin Wall came down, and, with its fall, the US defense industry’s longtime business model also crumbled. The industry had traditionally relied on selling the large weapons systems (missiles, bombers, and so forth) that were the backbone of US post–World War II military strategy.

The Talent Code: Greatest Isn't Born, It's Grown, Here's How
by Daniel Coyle
Published 27 Apr 2009

I have no idea how their brains function,” said Meadowmount's Skye Carman. “But it's a tiny, tiny percentage. The rest of us mortals have to work at it.” 2 Ignition Chapter 5 Primal Cues Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is a triumph of some enthusiasm. —Ralph Waldo Emerson “IF SHE CAN DO IT, WHY CAN'T I?” Growing skill, as we've seen, requires deep practice. But deep practice isn't a piece of cake: it requires energy, passion, and commitment. In a word, it requires motivational fuel, the second element of the talent code. In this section we'll see how motivation is created and sustained through a process I call ignition.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by Neil Postman and Jeff Riggenbach Ph.
Published 1 Apr 2013

Johnston attended lectures at this time at the Smithsonian Institution and “found the lecture halls jammed with capacity audiences of 1200 and 1500 people.”37 Among the lecturers these audiences could hear were the leading intellectuals, writers and humorists (who were also writers) of their time, including Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley, Louis Agassiz and Ralph Waldo Emerson (whose fee for a lecture was fifty dollars).38 In his autobiography, Mark Twain devotes two chapters to his experiences as a lecturer on the Lyceum circuit. “I began as a lecturer in 1866 in California arid Nevada,” he wrote. “[I] lectured in New York once and in the Mississippi Valley a few times; in 1868 [I] made the whole Western circuit; and in the two or three following seasons added the Eastern circuit to my route.”39 Apparently, Emerson was underpaid since Twain remarks that some lecturers charged as much as $250 when they spoke in towns and $400 when they spoke in cities (which is almost as much, in today’s terms, as the going price for a lecture by a retired television newscaster).

My Start-Up Life: What A
by Ben Casnocha and Marc Benioff
Published 7 May 2007

Even as I began slowly pulling away from the dayto-day minutia of my other teenage friends, I must have been doing something right. I later earned the top honor in my eighth-grade yearbook: “Most Popular.” (I also received “Most Likely to Be U.S. President,” but who cares about that?) CHAPTER 5.0 First Meeting with a VC (It’s All About the Network) My chief want in life is someone who shall make me do what I can. RALPH WALDO EMERSON For entrepreneurs, getting a meeting with a venture capitalist on the fabled Sand Hill Road, which runs through Menlo Park, and along the northern edge of the Stanford University campus, is a worthy accomplishment. If you don’t know a VC personally, it can take dozens of calls and emails to secure a meeting with someone who could fund your start-up.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
by Greg McKeown
Published 14 Apr 2014

For example, pursuing five different majors, each of them perfectly good, does not equal a degree. Likewise, five different jobs in five different industries do not add up to a forward-moving career. Without clarity and purpose, pursuing something because it is good is not good enough to make a high level of contribution. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The crime which bankrupts men and states is that of job-work;—declining from your main design to serve a turn here or there.” When teams are really clear about their purpose and their individual roles, on the other hand, it is amazing what happens to team dynamics. Formal momentum accelerates, adding up to a higher cumulative contribution of the team as a whole.

Soulful Simplicity: How Living With Less Can Lead to So Much More
by Courtney Carver
Published 26 Dec 2017

Anytime I’ve overreacted, I wasn’t present. I was distracted, tired, or removed in another way. I wasn’t really there. For a while I thought I was creating time to do more, but what I was really doing was creating the presence of mind to show up. To show all the way up. Adopt the Pace of Nature Presence requires patience. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” By taking walks, hiking, and watching the sunrise, I see that the most beautiful, magical things in life go at their own pace. No matter how many times I tried to will other people to move faster and get out of my way so I could get on with my busy day, it never worked.

Disarming the Narcissist: Surviving and Thriving With the Self-Absorbed
by Wendy T. Behary
Published 1 Jul 2013

To this end, the following chapters will help you sharpen your awareness, harness your courage, and maintain your enthusiasm while developing the skills you need for creating effective outcomes when dealing with the narcissist in your life. chapter 4 Overcoming the Obstacles: Communication Pitfalls, Snags, and Glitches It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. —Ralph Waldo Emerson You now have a framework for understanding narcissism: how to define it, how it affects the lives of narcissists, and how that acerbic behavior impacts those who must deal with these people (something you were probably all too familiar with already). The earlier chapters have given you a glimpse of the origins of narcissism and a conceptual understanding of these challenging people.

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 1 Dec 2010

It was one-third the cost of bottled water. 2. See the “Living Forever” chapter for more on this. THE SLOW-CARB DIET II The Finer Points and Common Questions As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. —Ralph Waldo Emerson The system is the solution. —AT&T This chapter answers the most common questions related to the Slow-Carb Diet, shares real-world lessons learned, and pinpoints the most common mistakes. I designate Saturday as “cheat day” in all of my answers, but, in practice, you can substitute any day of the week.

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If there is a range for cost, I have used the lower range for putting them in order. 2. Since I am not a woman, this test was found from a non-Hunter source: http://www.anylabtestnow.com/Tests/Female_Tests.aspx MUSCLES OF THE BODY (PARTIAL) THE VALUE OF SELF-EXPERIMENTATION All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. —Ralph Waldo Emerson It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong. —Richard Feynman This chapter was written by Dr. Seth Roberts, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California–Berkeley and professor of psychology at Tsinghua University.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick
Published 1 Mar 2011

In America, a country bursting with invention and scientific optimism, Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “What shall we think of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage? What shall we think of an engine of wood and metal which can … render the exactitude of its operations mathematically certain through its power of correcting its possible errors?”♦ Ralph Waldo Emerson had met Babbage in London and declared in 1870, “Steam is an apt scholar and a strong-shouldered fellow, but it has not yet done all its work.”♦ It already walks about the field like a man, and will do anything required of it. It irrigates crops, and drags away a mountain. It must sew our shirts, it must drive our gigs; taught by Mr.

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♦ “IT WOULD BE LIKE USING THE STEAM HAMMER”: H. P. Babbage, “The Analytical Engine,” 333. ♦ “WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF THE CALCULATING MACHINE”: “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” in The Prose Tales of Edgar Allan Poe: Third Series (New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1889), 230. ♦ “STEAM IS AN APT SCHOLAR”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870), 143. ♦ “WHAT A SATIRE IS THAT MACHINE”: Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), 11. ♦ “ONE OF THE MOST FASCINATING OF ARTS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 235

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction
by Alec Nevala-Lee
Published 22 Oct 2018

But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. . . . Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “NATURE” 4. Brass Tacks 1937–1939 There are times of evolutionary stress that have immensely hastened developments. Now I claim that this is, and will continue to be, such a time. —ARTHUR MCCANN, IN A LETTER TO ASTOUNDING, APRIL 1938 For readers of Astounding Science Fiction in the late thirties, the name of Arthur McCann would have been a familiar one.

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Susan Calvin—appeared in successive issues, establishing the series in the eyes of readers. Campbell cautioned him against becoming tied down to a formula, however, and when Asimov came to visit on March 17, 1941, the editor wanted to discuss an idea of his own. Campbell read him a line from an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!” He set the book aside. “What do you think would happen, Asimov, if men were to see the stars for the first time in a thousand years?”

Let My People Go Surfing
by Yvon Chouinard
Published 20 Jun 2006

A product designed with a close fit for climbing may also be worn by snowboarders or skiers who want a looser fit. In that case, the climber, as the core customer for that product, wins (the snowboarder or casual use customer can size up if she or he wants to). Is It as Simple as Possible? Simplify, simplify. —H. D. THOREAU One “simplify” would have sufficed. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, IN RESPONSE Koshun Miyamoto once complimented his fencing teacher’s wife on the beauty of her gravel garden, a square of coarse-grained sand, set off by three stones from a nearby stream that conveyed a “powerful, evocative image of space and balance.” The fencing teacher’s wife protested that the garden wasn’t complete and wouldn’t be until she could “express the same feeling it has now using only one stone instead of three.”

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return
by Mihir Desai
Published 22 May 2017

Indeed, the “optative mood” is the Greek grammatical form, now lost, for expressing wishes. Purchasing options allows us to wish for outcomes and allows us to imagine what is possible and what might come true. This link between options and the desire to explore what is possible is precisely why Ralph Waldo Emerson called America “optative”—options are for people who want to imagine the outcomes that they desire. The most distinctive aspect of options is how their asymmetric nature makes them particularly valuable when environments become more risky. Because you have little to lose and much to gain, events that make outcomes more extreme are welcome.

Adventures in Human Being (Wellcome)
by Gavin Francis
Published 28 Apr 2015

Spitfire pilots who were shot down often ended up with acrylic shrapnel from the cockpit embedded in the eye, and surgeons noticed that it didn’t cause an inflammatory reaction. 3 Aldous Huxley reused the phrase in his Doors of Perception. His Eyeless in Gaza took its title from Milton’s drama Samson Agonistes, written twenty years after Milton lost his sight. 4 Face: Beautiful Palsy He sees the beauty of a human face, and searches for the cause of that beauty, which must be more beautiful. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Montaigne WHEN I WAS TAUGHT facial anatomy as a medical student most of the cadavers we dissected were those of old men with thick facial skin, stiffened by stubble. Their faces might have been tough as hide, but the muscles that lay immediately beneath that skin were fragile: delicate fronds of salmon pink laced through buttery subcutaneous fat.

The Techno-Human Condition
by Braden R. Allenby and Daniel R. Sarewitz
Published 15 Feb 2011

But the railroad did more than (substantially) create modern industrial capitalism, the modern firm, the modern communication network, the modern urban landscape, and the modern sense of time. (By "create," of course, we mean "significantly force the co-evolution of.") Particularly in the United States, the railroad became a symbol of national power, and, more subtly, instantiated and validated the American integration of religion, morality, and technology. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Daniel Webster were among those who-in an unconscious recapitulation of language and powerful cultural memes that we saw in Bacon centuries earlier and an ocean away, and now hear again in transhumanism-viewed railroads as evidence of human ascension to godlike power. In the early 1800s the Western Railroad in Massachusetts urged ministers to "take an early opportunity to deliver a Discourse on the Moral effect of Rail-Roads in our wide extended country."

The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism
by Kyle Chayka
Published 21 Jan 2020

Pursuing material satisfaction was a sign that a person had already fallen from grace, according to Francis: “When the soul finds no delight, what is left except for the flesh to look for some?” The United States has its own secular saint of asceticism in Henry David Thoreau, who famously retreated into the woods from 1845 to 1847 in order to find the joy of simplicity. More accurately, he moved to land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson on Walden Pond, a small body of water walkable of an evening from the town center of Concord, Massachusetts, where he grew up and where his mother’s cooking was still freely available whenever he felt like going back. As far as an escape from society, it seems more like a child running away from home and making it to the nearest street corner.

Assassination Vacation
by Sarah Vowell
Published 28 Mar 2005

According to Booth’s sister, Asia, he said, “John Brown was a man inspired, the grandest character of the century!” Booth’s assessment was shared, based on the sermons preached in Brown’s honor after he died, the church bells that rang in his memory across the North, the tributes written for him by the likes of the revered three-named Yankee poets Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Julia Ward Howe (who said Brown’s martyrdom “would make the gallows glorious like the cross”), the fact that Union soldiers turned the marching song “John Brown’s Body” into one of the top-ten hits of the Civil War. So Booth isn’t entirely misguided in thinking he’d inspire a song or poem or two himself.

Unfamiliar Fishes
by Sarah Vowell
Published 22 Mar 2011

There men were shoehorned into grim little bunk beds infested with fleas and lice. As a sufferer of claustrophobia and seasickness, I can barely look at the creepy forecastle exhibit without dry-heaving. Most whaling ships were based out of New England, and most of those from New Bedford, Massachusetts, where, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “they hug an oil-cask like a brother.” I stopped by New Bedford on one of those perfect New England October days, when the sky is blue and the leaves are gilded and the air has that bracing autumnal bite so that all you want to do is bob for apples or hang a witch or something. I came to visit the New Bedford Whaling Museum, but really the whole town is a whaling museum.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
by Anne Lamott
Published 1 Jan 1994

Many index cards on which I write in the middle of the night tend to be incoherent, like some incredibly bright math major thinking about oranges or truth while on LSD. Some contain great quotes that I share with my students, although I unfortunately often forget to write down whose quote it is. Like this one, for instance: "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us." Now, I’m almost positive Ralph Waldo Emerson said this, but with my luck some critic will point out that it was really Georgette Mosbacher. (Who was it that said, "A critic is someone who comes onto the battlefield after the battle is over and shoots the wounded"? I have it written on an index card somewhere....) Other cards just sort of live with me, in little piles and drifts.

Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style
by Benjamin Dreyer
Published 15 Jan 2019

If I’ve inspired you to give it an extra thought every time you’re about to write or say the words “only” and “just,” I feel I’ve done my job. *2  Copy editor’s addendum: “For me, it was candles ‘guttering’ and ‘tang’ used for smell; both were used so often in literary fiction, I’d begun to think they were handed out with the MFA.” *3  Also, in no particular order, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Voltaire, Mahatma Gandhi, and (impudently and absurdly, given how easily traceable every word he ever wrote is) William Shakespeare. *4  “The very existence of self-help books is all the evidence you need that they don’t work,” a former colleague of mine once quipped—perhaps more cleverly than truthfully, but the quip business is built more on rat-a-tat effectiveness than on strict accuracy

The Little Black Book of Decision Making
by Michael Nicholas
Published 21 Jun 2017

If you would like to find out more about Michael and his work, or to connect with him, you may do so at www.michaelnicholas.com. Introduction “As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson Decisions are of considerable importance in practically every aspect of life. Professionally, they are arguably the thing that makes the difference to the level of success we achieve, because they determine how well every other talent or capability that we have can be applied. Our decision-making capability also determines the size and type of problem we can solve, and is therefore strongly related to how far we can progress and how much we will thrive.

Chasing Slow: Courage to Journey Off the Beaten Path
by Erin Loechner
Published 10 Jan 2017

Once, I called my friend Lisa, a social worker in Indiana, asking her how she knew what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. She told me stories of foster home visits and juvenile detention ministries and broken families and how it had just seemed like she could do something—anything—about one small part of it. “It’s like that saying,” she said. “Sometimes it’s more important to be useful than to be happy.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. That’s who said it: “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” But I was still operating with the mentality that to be useful, I had to feel useful. I hadn’t yet learned that sometimes the being comes before the feeling.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
by Ronald Purser
Published 8 Jul 2019

In Coming to Our Senses, he quotes Thoreau’s back-to-nature classic Walden; or, Life in the Woods: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.21 Kabat-Zinn compares this to his own philosophy of “living in harmony with oneself and with the world,” while “cultivating some appreciation for the fullness of each moment we are alive.” As he explains: “Thoreau saw the same problem with our ordinary mind state in New England in 1846 and wrote with great passion about its unfortunate consequences.”22 Retreating to a cabin on land owned by his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau turned his back on the horrors of industrialization and injustice, focusing instead on a simpler existence and transcending the mundane through contemplation. Kabat-Zinn calls Thoreau’s experience “a personal experiment in mindfulness. He chose to put his life on the line in order to revel in the wonder and simplicity of present moments.”23 Like Thoreau and Emerson, Kabat-Zinn reels off reasons to feel disenchanted with modern life, while offering a path to re-enchantment through retreat, if not physically then psychologically — in mindfulness practice.

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 1 Jan 2012

LESSON 04 SKILLS STAR PEELER, SAUTÉ UNION SQUARE ZUCCHINI + VARIATION: SQUASH PAPPARDELLE - * * * “The greatest delight the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me and I to them.” —RALPH WALDO EMERSON * * * “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.” —DOROTHY PARKER, WHEN CHALLENGED TO USE THE WORD HORTICULTURE IN A GAME OF “CAN-YOU-GIVE-ME-A-SENTENCE?” * * * This dish is named in honor of Joe Ades, but it was inspired by one of Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen Amsterdam students, while in Italy.‡ We make it faster by using the peeler in lieu of a knife, and we make it slow-carb with ghee in place of butter.

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STALLING MANEUVERS: AIR SQUATS, WALL PRESSES, AND CHEST PULLS I aim for 30–50 repetitions of each of the following: - Air Squats - Wall Presses - Chest Pulls For everything imaginable related to physical performance and appearance enhancement, please consult The 4-Hour Body. Now, back to our regular 4-Hour Chef programming! THE BASICS: ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR WATSON… - * * * “As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods.” — RALPH WALDO EMERSON * * * It’s helpful to think of cooking in two categories: texture changes (which typically happen below the boiling point of water) and chemical changes (which typically happen above the boiling point of water). It’s the chemical changes above 100°C (212°F) that change flavor. To get the benefits of both, you might cook a steak sous-vide, then sear it on a blistering hot grill, for instance.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016

No other era in human history, either before or since, combined so many elements in which the standard of living increased as quickly and in which the human condition was transformed so completely. Chapter 9 TAKING AND MITIGATING RISKS: CONSUMER CREDIT, INSURANCE, AND THE GOVERNMENT Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841 INTRODUCTION Household well-being depends not just on the level of income, but also on its volatility. This chapter is about institutions, particularly consumer credit and insurance, that allow the household to enjoy a standard of living that is less volatile over time. Consumer credit allows for the purchase of homes and consumer durables by spreading out payments over time and avoids the need to save the entire purchase price in advance.

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Eisner, Robert. (1989). The Total Incomes System of Accounts. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ellis, David Maldwyn. (1945). “Railroad Land Grant Rates, 1850–1945,” The Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 21, no. 3 (August): 207–22. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. (1841). The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. V 1838–41. Boston: Houghton Mifflin (published in 1911). Emmet, Boris, and Jeuck, John E. (1950). Catalogs and Counters: A History of Sears, Roebuck and Company. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Engerman, Stanley L., and Gallman, Robert E., eds. (2000a). The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Vol.

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Chapter 8: Working Conditions on the Job and at Home Harvey Greene, excerpts from The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915-1945. Copyright © 1992 by Harvey Green. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of the Univeristy of Arkansas Press, www.uapress.com. Chapter 9: Taking and Mitigating Risks Emerson, Ralph Waldo. (1841). The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. V 1838–41. Boston: Houghton Mifflin (published in 1911). Chapter 10: Fast Food, Synthetic Fibers, and Split-Level Subdivisions Rybczynski, Witold. (1995). “How to Build a Suburb,” The Wilson Quarterly 19, no. 3 (summer): 114–26. Chapter 11: See the USA in Your Chevrolet or from a Plane Flying High Above Music by Leon Carr, Words by Leo Corday, Copyright © 1948 (Renewed) by Music Sales Corporation and Fred Ahlert Music Corp., International Copyright Secured.

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed.
by Patricia Schultz
Published 13 May 2007

A replica of the trestle bridge over the narrow Concord River is part of the park, which also preserves the Wayside, home of Nathaniel Hawthorne, built in 1688. The Wayside is but a glimpse of Concord’s great literary legacy. The Orchard House, inspiration of Little Women and home of its author, Louisa May Alcott, and the prosperous-looking home of philosopher-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, are, like Hawthorne’s, open for tours (many of the town’s literary and revolutionary artifacts have been gathered at the impressive Concord Museum across the way). At the height of their fame in the mid-19th century, Concord was a center of Transcendentalism, a philosophical movement that looked to the simplicity of the natural world for guidance.

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When: North Bridge center daily, year-round; Minute Man center closed Dec–Mar. CONCORD: 19 miles northwest of Boston. Visitor info: Tel 978-369-3120; www.concordchamberofcommerce.org. THE WAYSIDE: Tel 978-369-6975; www.nps.gov/archive/mima/wayside. When: closed Nov–Apr. ORCHARD HOUSE: Tel 978-369-4118; www.louisamayalcott.org. RALPH WALDO EMERSON HOUSE: Tel 978-369-2236. When: closed Nov–mid-Apr and Mon–Wed year-round. HAWTHORNE INN: Tel 978-369-5610; www.concordmass.com. Cost: from $125 (off-peak), from $250 (peak). LONGFELLOW’S WAYSIDE INN: Tel 800-339-1776 or 978-443-1776; www.wayside.org. Cost: from $125; dinner $25. WALDEN POND STATE RESERVATION: Tel 978-369-3254; www.mass.gov/dcr/parks/walden.

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Center, S.Dak., 656 Ingalls Home, S.Dak., 656 Ingalls Homestead, S.Dak., 656 Laura Ingalls Wilder birthplace, Minn., 555–56 Laura Ingalls Wilder Country, S.Dak., 655–56 Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Highway, S.Dak., 656 Laura Ingalls Wilder Pageant, S.Dak., 656 Jack London State Historical Park, Calif., 861 Ketchum, Idaho, 604–5 Lake Pepin, Minn., 555–56 Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, Mass., 60 Margaret Mitchell House, Ga., 336 Miss Molly’s Inn, Va., 242 Montana Cowboy Poetry Gathering, Mont., 624–25 Montana Festival of the Book, Mont., 626–27 Moravian Bookshop, Pa., 208 Mount, The, Mass., 52 National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, Nev., 726 Naulakha, Vt., 95 Off Square Books, Miss., 444 Orchard House, Mass., 58 Oxford, Miss., 444–45 Oz Museum, Kans., 609 Poetry Nature Trail, N.H., 71 Ralph Waldo Emerson House, Mass., 58 Robert Frost Farm, N.H., 71 Robert Frost Trail, N.H., 71 Square Books, Miss., 444 Steinbeck Center, Calif., 831 Sunnyside, N.Y., 155 Toadstool Bookshop, N.H., 77 Twain, Mark Hannibal, Mo., 12, 449–50 Mark Twain Boyhood Home, Mo., 449 Mark Twain Cave, Mo., 449 Mark Twain Days, Calif., 809 Mark Twain House and Museum, Conn., 12–13 Mark Twain Museum & Gallery, Mo., 449 National Tom Sawyer Days, Mo., 449 Walden Pond, Mass., 58 Wayside (house), Mass., 58 Wayside Inn, Mass., 58 Widener Library, Mass., 47 Yaddo, N.Y., 203 MUSEUMS Alaska & Hawaii Bishop Museum, Hawaii, 960–61, 963 Lahaina Heritage Museum, Hawaii, 957 Lyman Museum & Mission House, Hawaii, 929 Mission Houses Museum, Hawaii, 963 Pacific Tsunami Museum, Hawaii, 929 Sheldon Jackson Museum of Native Arts, Alaska, 924 Canada Art Gallery of Ontario, Ont., 1004–5 Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic, N.S., 992 Heritage Museum, N.L., 982 Highland Village Museum, N.S., 988 Mackenzie Art Gallery, Sask., 1070 Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, N.S., 991 Museum of Anthropology, B.C., 1048–49 Royal British Columbia Museum, B.C., 1061 Royal Ontario Museum, Ont., 1006–7 Royal Tyrrell Museum, Alta., 1030–31 Vancouver Art Gallery, B.C., 1053 Four Corners and the Southwest African-American Museum, Tex., 766 Age of Steam Museum, Tex., 766 American Cowboy Museum, Colo., 708 Amon Carter Museum, Tex., 767 Anderson-Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum, N.Mex., 736 Argo Gold Mine, Mill and Museum, Colo., 715 Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Ariz., 700 Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, Nev., 731 Bradbury Science Museum, N.Mex., 743 Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave, Colo., 715 Charlotte Hall Museum, Ariz., 693 Colorado Ski Museum, Colo., 724 Crow Collection of Asian Art, Tex., 763 Dallas Museum of Art, Tex., 763 Denver Art Museum, Colo., 710–11 Desert Caballeros Western Museum, Ariz., 702 Dinosaur Museum, N.Mex., 746 Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, Tex., 767 Frontier Times Museum Living History Project, Tex., 759 Gallery at Wynn Las Vegas, Nev., 731 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, N.Mex., 750 Heard Museum, Ariz., 682, 690–91 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market, Ariz., 691 Heard Museum North, Ariz., 691 Houston’s Art Museums, Tex., 773–74 International UFO Museum and Research Center, N.Mex., 745 Kimbell Art Museum, Tex., 766 King Ranch Museum, Tex., 786 Las Vegas Art Museum, Nev., 731 Liberace Museum, Nev., 731 Long Barrack Museum, Tex., 782 Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, Tex., 787 Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Tex., 766 Museum Club, Ariz., 684 Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Tex., 774 Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, N.Mex., 747 Museum of International Folk Art, N.Mex., 747 Museum of Northern Arizona, Ariz., 684 National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, Tex., 767 Navajo Museum, Ariz., 690 Nevada Museum of Art, Nev., 734 O.

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
by Tony Hsieh
Published 6 Jun 2010

—George Bernard Shaw • “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” —H. S. Truman • “We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.” —Carlos Castaneda • “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson Appendix: Online Resources Web site for this book: http://www.deliveringhappinessbook.com Additional stories for which we didn’t have room in the book: http://www.deliveringhappinessbook.com/stories Book recommendations: http://www.deliveringhappinessbook.com/books Zappos core values: http://www.deliveringhappinessbook.com/zappos-core-values How to create committable core values for your organization: http://www.deliveringhappinessbook.com/core-values “How Twitter Can Make You a Better and Happier Person”: http://www.deliveringhappinessbook.com/twitter-better Follow me on Twitter (@zappos): http://twitter.com/zappos Public mentions of Zappos and our employees’ tweets: http://twitter.zappos.com Photos and videos of Zappos culture: http://blogs.zappos.com More information about Zappos: http://about.zappos.com Zappos Insights video subscription service for entrepreneurs and businesses: http://www.zapposinsights.com Zappos job opportunities: http://jobs.zappos.com Culture book (please include physical mailing address): ceo@zappos.com Tours of Zappos headquarters in Las Vegas: http://tours.zappos.com Recognized as one of the world’s most prestigious business imprints, Business Plus specializes in publishing books that are on the cutting edge.

The Cloudspotter's Guide
by Gavin Pretor-Pinney
Published 1 Jan 2006

BACK AT PAUL AND AMANDA’S, over a celebratory dinner of Barramundi fish, washed down with the amber nectar, I explained to the collected pilots that I had recently founded The Cloud Appreciation Society. Like a B-list actor promoting his latest film, I launched into a well-rehearsed speech in defense of our fluffy friends. Life would be dull, I declared, had we nothing but blue monotony to look at, day after day. I mentioned how Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American essayist, described the sky as ‘the daily bread of the eyes…the ultimate art gallery above.’ 4 And that the society therefore stands in opposition to ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it. Clouds are the face of the atmosphere, I proclaimed, enthusing on their ability to express its moods and communicate the invisible architecture of its currents.

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future
by Chris Guillebeau
Published 7 May 2012

*See the “Fish Stories” appendix at the back of the book for twenty-five more examples of how to reframe a descriptive concept as a benefit-driven story. GET PAID TO DO WHAT YOU LOVE BY MAKING SURE IT CONNECTS TO WHAT OTHER PEOPLE WANT. “Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.” —RALPH WALDO EMERSON Like many of us, Gary Leff begins his day with email. As a CFO for two university research centers in northern Virginia, he’s in touch with colleagues from morning to night. It’s a good job that he enjoys, and he has no plans to leave. But the “early early” morning email traffic comes from another source: Gary’s part-time business as a specific kind of consultant.

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
by Carl Sagan
Published 11 May 1998

[Tjhere always remain in the abyss of things slumbering parts which have yet to be awakened GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ, On the Ultimate Origination ofThings (1697) Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but. . . for everything that is given something is taken. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Self-Reliance," Essays: First Series (1841) twentieth century will be remembered for three broad JL innovations: unprecedented means to save, prolong, and 246 • Billions and Billions enhance life; unprecedented means to destroy life, including for the first time putting our global civilization at risk; and unprecedented insights into the nature of ourselves and the Universe.

Branding Your Business: Promoting Your Business, Attracting Customers and Standing Out in the Market Place
by James Hammond
Published 30 Apr 2008

We’ve all read the unbelievable company mission statements, engraved on a wall plaque in a corridor or reception area somewhere, that make all kinds of attractive claims yet attract only dust and spider’s webs. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you have to walk the talk, and nowhere is it more critical than in your BrandMe™ story. Be honest and transparent, or they’ll know for sure. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.’ Don’t make the mistake of not being genuine. YOUR BUSINESSBRAND™ STORY Usage: A powerful way to establish an emotional connection with customers. Can be incorporated into sales presentations, business plans and proposals, as well as collateral material. 226 Communicating your brand Now we extend the personal brand aspects into your business.

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
by Winifred Gallagher
Published 9 Mar 2009

The focused life requires not just a robust capacity for paying attention but also the discerning choice of targets that will invite the best possible experience. Much is made of the fact that human beings are the only creatures to know that we must die, but we’re also the only ones to know that we must find something engaging to focus on in order to pass the time—increasingly, a lot of time. As Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was William James’s godfather, put it, “To fill the hour—that is happiness.” Deciding what to pay attention to for this hour, day, week, or year, much less a lifetime, is a peculiarly human predicament, and your quality of life largely depends on how you handle it. Moses got his focus from God, and Picasso from his nearly supernatural creativity.

The Introvert Entrepreneur: Amplify Your Strengths and Create Success on Your Own Terms
by Beth Buelow
Published 3 Nov 2015

It’s not that we aren’t influenced by our environment or the people around us; we simply take in the information and put it through our own filters rather than taking it at face value. We carry our safety, our values, and our energy around inside of us, which contributes to an unmistakable quality of independence and self-reliance. My guess is that whoever coined the phrase “If you want it done right, do it yourself” was an introvert! Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” essay includes numerous statements about the virtues of this introvert tendency. Here’s one example: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life
by Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica
Published 14 Jul 2013

So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” We’re all shaped to some degree by our own biographies and cultures and it’s easy to believe that what’s happened before determines what has to come next. The American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson thought otherwise. “What lies behind us,” he wrote, “and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” Finding your Element is about discovering what lies within you and, in doing so, transforming what lies before you. “Risk” is a short poem often attributed to the writer Anais Nin.

First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time
by Emma Chapman
Published 23 Feb 2021

Chapter 3: The Small Bang Chapter 4: A Lucky Cloud of Gas Chapter 5: The Dark Ages Chapter 6: Fragmenting Stars Chapter 7: Stellar Archaeology Chapter 8: Galactic Cannibalism Chapter 9: The Cosmic Dusk Chapter 10: The Epoch of Reionisation Chapter 11: Unknown Unknowns References Acknowledgements Index Plates Introduction Teach me your mood, O patient stars! Who climb each night the ancient sky, Leaving on space no shade, no scars, No trace of age, no fear to die. Ralph Waldo Emerson In an age where we have particle colliders and space telescopes, it’s hard to imagine a time when we could solve the biggest questions of the cosmos by just looking up. Look up at the night sky, and what do you see? You might be lucky to live in an area of low light pollution, so perhaps you can see the Milky Way splashed across the sky.

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

Nannies who break the rules, perhaps sneaking in a text to their own children while out and about with their charges, might end up fired, or in a “nanny spotted” post on a local parenting messaging board.43 The impulse to retreat from technology—the “exit” in influential economist Albert Hirschman’s classic “exit or voice” schema—has echoes that go back to the American transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau railed against conformity, advocating independence and the development of intuition. A central part of their worldview was a deep skepticism toward technology. In Walden, Thoreau dismissed the significance of the train and the telegraph, calling them “improved means to an unimproved end.”

The Midnight Library
by Matt Haig
Published 12 Aug 2020

There were a lot of works on Eastern philosophy that she had never read before and she wondered if she stayed in this life, and she couldn’t see why not, whether there was a way to read them all before she had to do any more teaching at Cambridge. Novels, some Dickens, The Bell Jar, some geeky pop-science books, a few music books, a few parenting manuals, Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, some stuff on climate change, and a large hardback called Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape. She had rarely, if ever, been this consistently highbrow. This was clearly what happened when you did a Master’s degree at Cambridge and then went on sabbatical to write a book on your favourite philosopher.

5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose
by Nik Halik and Garrett B. Gunderson
Published 5 Mar 2018

Just recently, I spoke in the communist “hermit kingdom” of North Korea and taught geography to a classroom of teenagers about to graduate. I have conducted an entrepreneurial mastermind seminar to more than 750 investors and business owners in Tehran, Iran. “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” —ralph waldo emerson It’s Time to Live Your Dreams My adventurous life has not happened because I was born into wealth. Lacking a wealthy friend such as Tintin’s Captain Haddock, I realized that if I wanted to become an adventurer like Tintin, I would need to develop multiple pillars of income in order to afford such a lifestyle.

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One
by Jenny Blake
Published 14 Jul 2016

CHAPTER 2: PUT A PIN IN IT What Excites You Most? What Does Success Look Like One Year from Now? A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within. . . . Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. . . . Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” MOST PEOPLE—INCLUDING OUR CLOSEST FAMILY AND FRIENDS—DO NOT ASK US the big questions on a regular basis, if ever. They don’t typically start end-of-day debriefs with: What is working best in your life right now? What are you most excited about? What does smashing success look like one year from now?

The Finance Book: Understand the Numbers Even if You're Not a Finance Professional
by Stuart Warner and Si Hussain
Published 20 Apr 2017

Extract from audit report 5 We have nothing to report on the disclosures of principal risks Based on the knowledge we acquired during our audit, we have nothing material to add or draw attention to in relation to: – the Directors’ viability statement on page 25, concerning the principal risks, their management, and, based on that, the Directors’ assessment and expectations of the Group’s continuing in operation over the three years to 2018; or – the disclosures on page 76 concerning the use of the going concern basis of accounting. 26 Long-term solvency performance measures ‘Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, “If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?’” Ralph Waldo Emerson, American philosopher and poet In a nutshell Solvency is the ability of a business to pay its long-term debts. It is critical to risk management and long-term success. Solvency performance measures give an indication of ‘financial strength’, i.e. the ability to withstand exposure to short-term operating setbacks and achieve long-term growth.

The Intelligent Investor (Collins Business Essentials)
by Benjamin Graham and Jason Zweig
Published 1 Jan 1949

Something for a security analyst to look into. Commentary on Chapter 15 It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Practice, Practice, Practice Max Heine, founder of the Mutual Series Funds, liked to say that “there are many roads to Jerusalem.” What this masterly stock picker meant was that his own value-centered method of selecting stocks was not the only way to be a successful investor. In this chapter we’ll look at several techniques that some of today’s leading money managers use for picking stocks.

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See also “earning power”; per-share earnings; price/earnings ratio; specific company or type of security earnings-covered test Eastman Kodak Co. EDGAR database Edison Electric Light Co. Edward VII (king of Great Britain), “efficient markets hypothesis” (EMH) Electric Autolite Co. Electronic Data Systems electronics industry Elias, David Ellis, Charles ELTRA Corp. EMC Corp. emerging-market nations Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson Electric Co. Emery Air Freight Emhart Corp. employee-purchase plans employees: stock options for. See also managers/management endowment funds “enhancing shareholder value,” Enron Corp. enterprising investors. See aggressive investors EPS. See per-share earnings Erie Railroad ethics eToys Inc.

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
by Eric Kaufmann
Published 24 Oct 2018

In two centuries, few people living in urban areas of the West will have an unmixed racial background. Most who do will be immigrants or members of anti-modern religious groups like the ultra-Orthodox Jews. The reflex is to think of this futuristically, as bringing forth increased diversity, or the advent of a ‘new man’, much as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Israel Zangwill or Time magazine predicted for the United States.1 But, if history is our guide, things are likely to turn out quite differently. Many people desire roots, value tradition and wish to maintain continuity with ancestors who have occupied a historic territory. This means we’re more likely to experience what I term Whiteshift, a process by which white majorities absorb an admixture of different peoples through intermarriage, but remain oriented around existing myths of descent, symbols and traditions.

…

Americans welcomed immigration to grow the country, and could wax lyrical about the US as a ‘new’ nation made up of various European peoples. At the same time, they considered themselves more Protestant and Anglo-Saxon than Britain. So Jefferson could affirm both the asylum and Anglo-Saxon traditions without cognitive dissonance. Here is the great American liberal philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in 1846 about the US as ‘The asylum of all nations … the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, of the Africans and Polynesians, will construct a new race … as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the Dark Ages.’11 And around the same time he declared: It cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family … The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot.

The Enlightened Capitalists
by James O'Toole
Published 29 Dec 2018

A few of the original water-propelled spinning mules have been returned to working order, and the mills now produce a small quantity of Scottish wool for sale to the thousands of tourists who visit New Lanark’s idyllic setting on the banks of the river Clyde in what has become a beautiful nature preserve. But long before that happened, Owen had died a defeated man. In Owen’s old age, Ralph Waldo Emerson asked him, “Who is your disciple? How many men possessed of your views will remain after you to put them into practice?” Owen answered, sadly, “Not one.”50 He was right at the time, but were he alive today, he doubtless would be pleased to learn that the practices he pioneered at New Lanark had been adopted, in one form or another, in several successful businesses founded in Britain and America over the next century and a half.

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Tawney, The Radical Tradition (New York: Minerva, 1964), 37–38. 45.Owen, Threading My Way, 201. 46.Podmore, Robert Owen, 325. 47.Bob Blaisdell, The Communist Manifesto and Other Revolutionary Writings (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), 101. 48.Owen, Threading My Way, 291. 49.McCabe, Robert Owen, 119. 50.The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 10 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904), 347. Chapter 2: Man with a Thousand Partners: James Cash Penney (1875–1971) 1.Norman Beasley, Main Street Merchant: The Story of the J. C. Penney Company (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948), 8. 2.J. C. Penney, Fifty Years with the Golden Rule (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 24. 3.Penney, 25. 4.Penney, 26. 5.Mary E.

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
by David Brooks
Published 1 Jan 2000

Their aesthetic was more naturalist than artistic. Richard Hofstadter called transcendentalism “the evangelicalism of the highbrows” because the transcendentalists always had enormous influence on the educated classes. They were mostly New England thinkers, writers, and reformers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller. They got their name because their goal was to transcend materialism and rationalism and so penetrate the inner spirituality that was at the core of each person. They began with the conviction, expressed by William Channing, that “there is something greater within [each individual] than in the whole material creation, than in all the worlds which press on the eye and ear; and that inward improvements have a worth and dignity in themselves.”

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
by David Allen
Published 31 Dec 2002

is . . . the key question in making knowledge workers productive. And it is a question that demands risky decisions. There is usually no right answer; there are choices instead. And results have to be clearly specified, if productivity is to be achieved.” The ancestor of every action is a thought. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Most people have a resistance to initiating the burst of energy that it will take to clarify the real meaning, for them, of something they have let into their world, and to decide what they need to do about it. We’re never really taught that we have to think about our work before we can do it; much of our daily activity is already defined for us by the undone and unmoved things staring at us when we come to work, or by the family to be fed, the laundry to be done, or the children to be dressed at home.

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011

Thoreau’s fact is in the fact’s most basic form: Some this is a that. Yet Thoreau’s identification of that bird wasn’t the sort of fact that does the heavy-lifting of knowledge. It did not advance our knowledge of gulls, of wings, or even of spots in any appreciable way. Thoreau was not that ambitious. As Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented in his eulogy of his friend, “instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party.”32 While Thoreau was picking huckleberries, Charles Darwin was spending seven years intently exploring the small world of Cirripedia—barnacles. The two resulting dry and difficult volumes—so little like his masterful On the Origin of Species published just a few years later in 1859—are careful recitations of facts that together describe the little creatures in unrelenting detail.

The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world
by Michael Pollan
Published 27 May 2002

The apple has been far more eager to do business with humans, and perhaps nowhere more so than in America. Like generations of other immigrants before and after, the apple has made itself at home here. In fact, the apple did such a convincing job of this that most of us wrongly assume the plant is a native. (Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, who knew a thing or two about natural history, called it “the American fruit.”) Yet there is a sense—a biological, not just metaphorical sense—in which this is, or has become, true, for the apple transformed itself when it came to America. Bringing boatloads of seed onto the frontier, Johnny Appleseed had a lot to do with that process, but so did the apple itself.

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives)
by David Birch
Published 14 Jun 2017

In my book Identity Is the New Money I wrote in similar vein that there is a mismatch between that mentality and a new, post-industrial economy with a different technological basis for money and that in a generation or so there will be a completely new set of monetary arrangements in place. Whether you think of it as money with a memory or programmable money or smart money or whatever, understanding the money of the future means a new mental model. Chapter 12 Seeds of the future The value of the dollar is social, as it is created by society. — Ralph Waldo Emerson in The Conduct of Life (1860) Money is nothing more than bits; we will have a cashless economy and all money will be digital money. What does this mean for the future? I will begin by observing that talk of ‘digital money’ can be confusing. Almost all money has existed only in computers for some time, so we need to clarify before we move on.

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion
by Paul Bloom

If you want to know people’s views, then, a perfectly good question is “Are you liberal or conservative?” Indeed, some believe that a political continuum from left to right might be universal. John Stuart Mill pointed out that political systems have “a party of order or stability and a party of progress or reform.” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “the two parties which divide the state, the party of conservatism and that of innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made,” and he went on to conclude that such “irreconcilable antagonism must have a correspondent depth of seat in the human condition.”

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life
by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky
Published 18 Jun 2012

Carey was voicing the common sense of his age when he described the earth as “a great machine, given to man to be fashioned to his purpose.”19 The Baconian project and its industrial aftermath provoked an impassioned reaction from poets and writers. Wordsworth’s protest against the rape of nature was taken up by John Ruskin and William Morris in England, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson in America and numerous others. What moved these writers was not any scientific theory of pollution or resource depletion but a primal, semi-pagan sense of nature as sacred and a corresponding horror of human meddling. “All is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil,” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins, contemplating the effects of man’s activity on the earth.

The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer
by Charles J. Murray
Published 18 Jan 1997

And their contri- butions will be remembered after the illusory line between super- computing and the rest of the industry has long since disap- peared. APril 5, 1996 / VII If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door. -RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1871 Thank heaven for start-up companies or we'd never make any progress. People who get unhappy with structure in compa- nies can move on and start their own, take big risks and occa- sionally find the pot of gold. I think that's just wonderful. -SEYMOUR R. CRAY, 1994 PROLOGUE . . . . . . . . . . .

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Sep 2014

,” Mother Jones, May/June 2013. 31.Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Verso, 1998), 43. 32.Anonymous, “Slaves to the Smartphone,” Economist, March 10, 2012. 33.Kevin Kelly, “What Technology Wants,” Cool Tools, October 18, 2010, kk.org/cooltools/archives/4749. 34.George Packer, “No Death, No Taxes,” New Yorker, November 28, 2011. 35.Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4–5. 36.Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper, 1991), 80. 37.Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 57. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The epigraph to this book is the concluding stanza of William Carlos Williams’s poem “To Elsie,” which appeared in the 1923 volume Spring and All. I am deeply grateful to those who, as interviewees, reviewers, or correspondents, provided me with insight and assistance: Claudio Aporta, Henry Beer, Véronique Bohbot, George Dyson, Gerhard Fischer, Mark Gross, Katherine Hayles, Charles Jacobs, Joan Lowy, E.

The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work
by Vishen Lakhiani
Published 14 Sep 2020

The ideas are infinite. Get the full Love Week Implementation Guide and see a behind-the-scenes video at www.mindvalley.com/badass. CHAPTER 4 MASTER UNFUCKWITHABILITY To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. —Ralph Waldo Emerson In a world of many options we seek to follow others rather than follow our own inner guidance. The key is to learn to love yourself deeply and learn to trust your inner yearnings. As you do, you can channel these dreams, visions, and desires into a masterpiece of a life. As a leader, you can bring this out in others too.

The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number
by Mario Livio
Published 23 Sep 2003

The general property that each term in the sequence is equal to the sum of the two preceding ones is expressed mathematically as (a notation introduced in 1634 by the mathematician Albert Girard): Fn+2=Fn+1 + Fn Here Fn represents the nth number in the sequence (e.g., F5 is the fifth term); Fn+1 is the term following Fn (for n = 5, n+1 = 6), and Fn+2 follows Fn+1 Figure 27 The reason that Fibonacci's name is so famous today is that the appearance of the Fibonacci sequence is far from being confined to the breeding of rabbits. Incidentally, the title of this chapter was inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson's The Natural History of Intellect, which appeared in 1893. Emerson says: “All the thoughts of a turtle are turtles, and of a rabbit, rabbits.” We shall encounter the Fibonacci sequence in an incredible variety of seemingly unrelated phenomena. To start things off, let us examine a phenomenon that is just about as remote from the topic of rabbit progeny as we could possibly imagine—the optics of light rays.

That Wild Country: An Epic Journey Through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands
by Mark Kenyon
Published 2 Dec 2019

An emerging philosophy that viewed the natural world with reverence rather than pure capitalistic lust was gaining traction across the country around this same time. The movement was born out of the same roots as Romanticism and transcendentalism in the 1800s—with champions like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. For much of the young nation’s history, settlers had viewed the wilderness as a threat to their lives, an obstacle to civilization, and a roadblock to progress. But, as eastern American cities became ever more industrialized, polluted, and overcrowded, people were coming to see the natural world in a different way.

A Sting in the Tale
by Dave Goulson
Published 24 Apr 2013

fn1 Bird’s-foot trefoil is so named because the seed pods look remarkably like the three-toed foot of a bird, not because they smell of birds’ feet! CHAPTER SEVEN Tasmanian Devils Burly, dozing humblebee, Where thou art is clime for me. Let them sail for Porto Rique, Far-off heats through seas to seek. I will follow thee alone, Thou animated torrid-zone! Ralph Waldo Emerson (American poet) In Tasmania the first bumblebee was recorded in 1992. There was no mistaking her, for the local bee species are tiny – small enough to hide under a grain of rice, mostly drab and not very furry. Nor do bumblebees naturally occur anywhere near Tasmania, for they are mainly creatures of the northern hemisphere.

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
by Bhaskar Sunkara
Published 1 Feb 2019

He even described his ideals of communal living to a session of Congress attended by outgoing president James Monroe and the newly elected John Quincy Adams. The “terrestrial paradise” Owen sought to build was continually reorganized over the following years, and he soon had to admit defeat and return to the United Kingdom. Followers of Charles Fourier—Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson among them—made their own attempts at communes a decade later, with similar results. After the 1848 Revolutions in Europe, “scientific socialism” was introduced to the United States by German refugees. Joseph Weydemeyer was one notable example. A former Prussian artillery officer turned committed Marxist, he fled to America in 1851.

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed
by Carl Honore
Published 29 Jan 2013

“The group is crucial for developing and improving ideas, but often the best ideas start with a single person. The individual is supremely important.” CHAPTER TEN CATALYZE: First among Equals Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man. His character determines the character of the organization. Ralph Waldo Emerson Rush hour in Bogotá is not what it used to be. At least not for people like Manuel Ortega. These days, the 42-year-old banker commutes from the suburbs on a bus that has helped turn the Colombian capital into a darling of the green movement and a case study in urban renewal. The TransMilenio is no ordinary transport network.

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism
by Olivia Fox Cabane
Published 1 Mar 2012

Another told me that while he’d always used visualization techniques in sports and music, he had never thought to apply the same techniques to business and daily life and was astounded at the results (and kicking himself for not having thought of it sooner). Nineteenth-century author Napoleon Hill would regularly visualize nine famous men as his personal counselors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Edison, Charles Darwin, and Abraham Lincoln. He wrote: “Every night… I held an imaginary council meeting with this group whom I called my ‘Invisible Counselors.’… I now go to my imaginary counselors with every difficult problem that confronts me and my clients. The results are often astonishing.”

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets
by Michael Blastland
Published 3 Apr 2019

I am not about to settle the argument to anyone’s satisfaction. Though I will say this: consistency can be over-rated. For example, as the economist John Kay pointed out, you can be consistent in believing there are fairies at the bottom of the garden.6 Consistency alone can be a measure of insanity. John quotes approvingly Ralph Waldo Emerson’s line: ‘Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers and divines.’7 The point here is that consistency, far from being a necessary measure of rationality, might not even be desirable. I’m fond of an observation by Duncan Watts, a sociologist and now principal researcher for Microsoft, that the aphorisms we use to guide us are often contradictory.

The Gene: An Intimate History
by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Published 16 May 2016

F. Dove, Perspectives on Genetics: Anecdotal, Historical, and Critical Commentaries, 1987–1998 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 176. “like watching a bowl of hundreds of grapes”: Robert Horvitz, author interview, 2012. “There is no history”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 7, ed. William H. Gilman (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), 202. 131 extra cells had somehow disappeared: Ning Yang and Ing Swie Goping, Apoptosis (San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool Life Sciences, 2013), “C. elegans and Discovery of the Caspases.”

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer
by Novella Carpenter
Published 25 May 2010

“Garden OK,” he said after we made introductions. Then he pointed to a few nongarden items that had made it onto the lot, like some old doors and a biodiesel reactor Bill had built. “Only garden.” I nodded, and that was the end of our exchange. If I was trying to be Thoreau, I liked to think of Chan as a modern-day version of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the owner of Walden Pond and its surrounding fields. My fellow squatter Thoreau did have permission from the landowner, but he still liked to call what he was doing—just as I did—squatting. Once I got Jack Chan’s terse seal of approval, I began enhancing the land big-time. The next year the whole lot sprawled with giant orange Rouge Vif d’Estampes pumpkins.

The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life
by Pam Grout
Published 14 May 2007

You’ll get to the island on one of the lab’s research vessels (they maintain a daily schedule during the summer season from June to late September), stay in one of the dorms, share meals at Kiggins Commons, the hub of the campus, and take field trips to the other islands in the archipelago on the lab’s small fleet of Boston Whalers, inflatable boats, a 19-foot sailboat, and the 47-foot R/V John M. Kingsbury. Although Appledore Island has been a research station for more than 30 years, it once served as a gathering ground for such literati as Mark Twain and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who came to stay at the summer hotel built by the father of poet Celia Thaxter. That hotel, one of the first built on the New England coast, burned to the ground in 1914, but Thaxter’s Garden, a fabulous mess of poppies, sweet peas, hollyhocks, asters, and clematis that was immortalized in her 1894 book An Island Garden, is still there—or rather was re-created in 1977 by Dr.

The Pragmatic Programmer
by Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas
Published 19 Oct 1999

In a world of imperfect systems, ridiculous time scales, laughable tools, and impossible requirements, let's play it safe. When everybody actually is out to get you, paranoia is just good thinking. • Woody Allen 21. Design by Contract Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing. • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays Dealing with computer systems is hard. Dealing with people is even harder. But as a species, we've had longer to figure out issues of human interactions. Some of the solutions we've come up with during the last few millennia can be applied to writing software as well. One of the best solutions for ensuring plain dealing is the contract.

Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It
by Gabriel Wyner
Published 4 Aug 2014

Eventually, you’ll need to make new grammatical constructions on your own if you want them to stick, so if you roughly know how to say something, then try to do it without Google’s help. Remember, you have access to native speakers to help turn your mistakes into new, useful flash cards. CHAPTER 6 The Language Game It is a happy talent to know how to play. —Ralph Waldo Emerson By learning the sounds of your language, you gain access to words. By learning words, you gain access to grammar. And with just a little bit of grammar, you gain access to the rest of your language. This is the language game. It’s the moment when a new language unfolds before your eyes and you can choose your own games to play and your own paths to follow.

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction
by Richard Bookstaber
Published 1 May 2017

Kundera (2003), 132–33. 16. The discussion here is based on Posnock (2008). In his exposition of Kundera’s novel, Posnock points out that though one was shaped by twentieth-century communist Czechoslovakia and the other by the nineteenth-century democratic United States, Kundera’s concept is mirrored in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s (1993) essays “Circles” and “Experience.” In “Circles,” Emerson writes that, as is the case with Tomas and Teresa, the “results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable,” and we wish to let go of control; we have an “insatiable desire” to “do something without knowing how or why.” The opening line of Emerson’s essay “Experience” echoes Kundera: “Where do we find ourselves?”

Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar--Your Brain's Silent Killers
by David Perlmutter and Kristin Loberg
Published 17 Sep 2013

And if you do, then you can use the week to increase the duration and intensity of your workouts, or try something new. CHAPTER 9 Good Night, Brain Leverage Your Leptin to Rule Your Hormonal Kingdom Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON WHEN SAMUEL, A FORTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD STOCKBROKER, came to see me on a late-November day, he asked me to “optimize his health.” This wasn’t the first time someone had made such a blanket, somewhat vague request, but I knew what he really wanted: He wanted me to get to the bottom of his misery and deliver him to a place of vibrant health like he’d never felt before.

The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion
by Virginia Postrel
Published 5 Nov 2013

Metropolitan life offered a chance at reinvention, not to mention pleasures forbidden at home, giving substance to the image of transformation and escape. Writing from nineteenth-century Paris, two young women from provincial Limoges described the city as “an emancipation, a dream. . . . What charmed them specially was ‘that no one spied upon anyone.’ ”43 Young men loved Paris, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, “because of the perfect freedom—freedom from observation as well as interference—in which each one walks.”44 Boswell, too, relished the city’s privacy and freedom. “The satisfaction of pursuing whatever plan is most agreeable, without being known or looked at, is very great,” he wrote.45 It wasn’t really true, of course, that residents were never spied on, observed, or looked at, as Addison’s desire to “raise what speculations I please upon others” demonstrates.

The Big Oyster
by Mark Kurlansky
Published 20 Dec 2006

said the American friend, who had come to see him off. “Return to Broadway,” said his lordship, “and have some more oysters.” c h a p t e r n i n e Ostreamaniacal Behavior The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population. — h e n r y d av i d t h o r e au in a letter from New York to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843 M anhattan was the field for the bloodiest engage- ment of the Civil War that did not involve Confederate troops. Five Points, the most infamous slum in America, was ruled by street gangs such as the Swamp Angels, who earned their name by attacking from out of sewers, the Daybreak Boys, who were ten and eleven years old, the Dead Rabbits, who went into battle with their namesake impaled on a pike.

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays
by Phoebe Robinson
Published 14 Oct 2021

A decade later, academics recommended self-care as a way for PTSD sufferers to combat their symptoms, and the solutions included things we tend to do today: meditation, eating well, sleeping, exercising, etc. With these remedies, coupled with all these white dudes such as Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson authoring the narrative of American individualism and specialness, it’s easy to see how the seeds of self-care as it’s commonly understood today were planted. Nothing against these guys because they were mighty with the pen, but white men stay creating chaos with their semi-self-absorbed nonsense like overconfident Steve Urkels minus the apologetic “Did I do that?”

Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child
by Alissa Quart
Published 16 Aug 2006

Giftedness had its antecedents: in The Republic Plato suggested that a handpicked child elite should be raised by teachers rather than their parents after the age of ten, and that this child elite should be composed of all classes. Eventually, its members would be ready to rule. In America, the blueprint of a merit-based elite found sponsors in men like Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Jefferson wanted the new country to locate and educate a “natural aristocracy” based on merit, rather than favoring privileged children. “There is a natural aristocracy among men,” said Jefferson. “The grounds of this are virtue and talents.” Of course, in the time of Plato, slaves were in abundance, and Jefferson was himself a slaveholder.

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work
by Alex Rosenblat
Published 22 Oct 2018

The spread of Uber and Lyft prompted local taxi businesses to build their own apps in many local cities across the United States and Canada, such as Plattsburgh, NY (Plattsburgh Taxi), and Montreal (Téo Taxi). Ignacio is optimistic about Uber’s imminent arrival in the state. “I think it’s good for consumers, more choices,” he offers. As Ignacio articulates his thoughts on the arrival of Uber, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poetic line comes to mind: “America is another name for opportunity.” On a recent vacation to country-music capital Nashville, Tennessee, Ignacio used Uber himself, and it worked well. But when he tried to go with his family to the airport, surge pricing was in effect. Rather than paying fifty dollars for a fourteen-dollar-trip, he hailed a local taxi.

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution
by Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg
Published 15 Mar 2017

Identifiers: LCCN 2016058472 (print) | LCCN 2016059585 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544716940 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780544716964 (ebook) Subjects: | MESH: Gene Editing—history | CRISPR-Cas Systems | Genetic Code | Genetic Research—history | United States Classification: LCC QH440 (print) | LCC QH440 (ebook) | NLM QU 11 AA1 | DDC 576.5072—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058472 Illustrations throughout the book drawn by Jeffery Mathison Cover design by Martha Kennedy Cover photograph © kirstypargeter/Getty Images v1.0517 To our parents, Dorothy and Martin Doudna (J.A.D.) and Susanne Nimmrichter and Robert Sternberg (S.H.S.) Science does not know its debt to imagination. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Prologue: The Wave IN MY DREAM, I am standing on a beach. To either side of me, a long, salt-and-pepper strip of sand runs along the water, outlining a large bay. It is, I realize, the shore of the island of Hawaii where I grew up: the edge of Hilo Bay, where I once spent weekends with friends watching canoe races and searching for shells and the glass balls that sometimes washed ashore from Japanese fishing boats.

The Simulation Hypothesis
by Rizwan Virk
Published 31 Mar 2019

Multiple Lives and the Doctrines of Reincarnation Let’s take a closer look at the Eastern traditions first. Reincarnation is a doctrine that is shared by many of the Indian religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, in addition to having adherents in the West (Plato in ancient Greek times and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among many others, in more modern times). Although a more literal translation of the ancient Sanskrit texts would be rebirth or transmigration, the idea is the same: each soul (or consciousness, to use a less religiously pregnant term) goes through multiple lives, learning lessons and fulfilling its karma during each.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
by David Eagleman
Published 29 May 2011

For example, computers have boot sectors which are inaccessible by the operating system—they are too important for the operation of the computer for any other higher level systems to find inroads and gain admission, under any circumstances. Montague noted that whenever we try to think about ourselves too much, we tend to “blink out”—and perhaps this is because we are getting too close to the boot sector. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote over a century earlier, “Everything intercepts us from ourselves.” Much of who we are remains outside our opinion or choice. Imagine trying to change your sense of beauty or attraction. What would happen if society asked you to develop and maintain an attraction to someone of the gender to which you are currently not attracted?

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs
by Tim Draper
Published 18 Dec 2017

Toynbee Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success. Dale Carnegie Willie Mays could throw better, and Hank Aaron could hit more home runs. But I've got enthusiasm. I've got desire. I've got hustle. Those are God-given talents, too. Pete Rose Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. Ralph Waldo Emerson The Bucket List Story When I was 32 years old, before anyone knew the term “bucket list,” Ted Leonsis and I were leaving a Preview Travel board meeting on a plane heading from Lanai to Honolulu. It was a very turbulent flight and we were starting to think that this might be our last one. Ted turned to me and said, “Make a list of the 100 things you want to do before you die.”

Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism
by Mikael Colville-Andersen
Published 28 Mar 2018

It is time to begin. Let’s look around our cities. Observation is power. Citizens see more clearly than engineers and planners as they move through the public space. Their space. We must follow their lead. CHAPTER 13 A2BISM A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before. Ralph Waldo Emerson Cyclist at night in Copenhagen. I know exactly what you want. It’s the same thing that I want. Indeed, it’s what every homo sapien who has ever lived wants: a direct line from A to B when we’re transporting ourselves. Humans are like rivers carving through a landscape—we will always find the easiest route.

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business
by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro
Published 30 Aug 2021

4 Million People, Activists Estimate,” Vox, September 22, 2019, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/9/20/20876143/climate-strike-2019-september-20-crowd-estimate. 18 Greta Thunberg, 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 24), Katowice, Poland, 2018. 19 Henry David Thoreau, A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers, eds. Sophie Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Ticknor and Fields, 1866). 20 George Hendrick, “The Influence of Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ on Gandhi’s Satyagraha,” The New England Quarterly 29, no. 4 (1956): 462–71; Mark Engler and Paul Engler, This Is an Uprising (New York: Nation, 2017); Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (New York: Porter Sargent Publishers, 1973). 21 Erica Chenoweth and Maria J.

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now
by Sergey Young
Published 23 Aug 2021

We don’t (yet) have forever. Let’s begin our journey—welcome to the Longevity Revolution! CHAPTER 3 THE LONGEVITY REVOLUTION The Three Most Popular Myths About Longevity, and the Four Technological Shifts Blowing Them Apart “Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Philosopher “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” —Bill Gates, Entrepreneur, Global Health Pioneer “Who wants to live forever?” —Freddy Mercury, Musician As I walked through the grand stone gateway of Vatican City, I felt like I was stepping back in time.

SAM: One Robot, a Dozen Engineers, and the Race to Revolutionize the Way We Build
by Jonathan Waldman
Published 7 Jan 2020

He had a photographic memory and an astronomical IQ, and when he returned from the Pacific, where he lost two platoons in World War II, he took to calling everyone Charlie and started Buffalo Sheet Metal. Scott, his grandson, he called Charlie. The other side of Nancy’s family was English and Scottish. At least one fought in the Revolutionary War. Other relatives fought in the War of 1812 and the Civil War. One ancestor married Sarah Waldo, making her and Scott very distant cousins of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In memory of his genius maternal grandfather and his paternal great-grandfather, Scott was given the middle name Lawrence, but it might as well have been Nathaniel—and not for the tailor from Saugus. Nathaniel Holmes, born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1639, was the first American-born of Nancy’s ancestors.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein
Published 15 Sep 2014

As a result, it is said, the philosopher caught pneumonia, which eventually led to his demise.33 Despite some controversy, the anecdote survives for its seeming poetic justice: a man who thought nature could be bent to his will died from simple exposure to the cold. A similar story of comeuppance appears to be unfolding for the human race as a whole. Ralph Waldo Emerson called coal “a portable climate”—and it has been a smash success, carrying countless advantages, from longer life spans to hundreds of millions freed from hard labor.34 And yet precisely because our bodies are so effectively separated from our geographies, we who have access to this privilege have proven ourselves far too capable of ignoring the fact that we aren’t just changing our personal climate but the entire planet’s climate as well, warming not just the indoors but the outdoors too.

…

Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2011), 10. 33. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, “What’s in a Name? Rivalries and the Birth of Modern Science,” in Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society, ed. Bill Bryson (London: Royal Society, 2010), 120. 34. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1903), 70. 35. Clive Hamilton, “The Ethical Foundations of Climate Engineering,” in Climate Change Geoengineering: Philosophical Perspectives, Legal Issues, and Governance Frameworks, ed. Wil C. G. Burns and Andrew L. Strauss (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 58. 36.

The Evolution of Useful Things
by Henry Petroski
Published 2 Jan 1992

Polystyrene coffee cups were an exception, and in late 1990 they were in the process of being replaced by thick-paper cups. All of these decisions were clearly more politically than technologically driven, pointing up the complex dynamics behind the evolution of artifacts. The conventional wisdom is that technology affects society in irreversible ways and that, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in a poem, “Things are in the saddle, / and ride mankind.” However, we might also extend the metaphor by recognizing that we are capable of rearing up and bucking off things that we find too burdensome or that we feel are taking us in the wrong direction. But, in spite of the spectrum of forces at work in pushing and pulling the form of everything from plastic packaging to the hamburger it contains, there remains a unifying principle behind all influences on form.

Rats
by Robert Sullivan
Published 8 May 2009

—John Murphy, an exterminator, in Pest Control Technology magazine I think his fancy for referring everything to the meridian of Concord did not grow out of any ignorance or depreciation of other longitudes or latitudes, but was rather a playful expression of his conviction of the indifferency of all places, and that the best place for each is where he stands. He expressed it once in this wise: "I think nothing is to be hoped from you, if this bit of mould under your feet is not sweeter to you to eat than any other in this world, or in any world." —Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a remembrance of Henry David Thoreau *' It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not, I am with you, you men and women of a Generation, or ever so many generations hence, Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd . . .

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives
by Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez
Published 5 Jan 2010

This is the freedom, not simply of the open road—Walt Whitman was able to celebrate that long before the car existed—but independence from reliance on the schedules and desires of others, whether a family member holding the car keys or a train conductor wielding a timetable. The car is experienced as the ultimate tool of self-reliance—which Ralph Waldo Emerson promoted well before the automotive age as well, of course. But in a world where transportation is centered on a road built for cars, you must be a driver to achieve the valued status of a truly independent person. Unlicensed and carless adults know this better than most; they cope with the anxiety or guilt of relying on others for rides or the shame of seeming somehow immature, inadequate, or incompetent.

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership
by Richard Branson
Published 8 Sep 2014

Hiring the right people is a skill, and like most things you get better at it with practice, but there are some good shortcuts that can help you learn quickly. Here are my tips for identifying great people and building your team. CHARACTERS AND CULTURES Although almost certainly not involved in hiring people, the nineteenth-century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that, ‘Character is higher than intellect.’ I am sure it will come as no surprise that I wholeheartedly endorse this line of thought, although the task of uncovering the true character of a job candidate can be a challenge. Essentially an interview is a game of figuring out whether or not the character of a candidate will be a good fit with the culture of the company.

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 13 Nov 2012

The origin of a fantastic variety of living things could be explained by the contribution of which novel features, possibly of random provenance, made it to survival. There was little or nothing in physical or biological science that foreshadowed selection as a causal principle. —B. F. Skinner Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. —Ralph Waldo Emerson A Metaphor from Geology In the early nineteenth century geologists pondered a fundamental question. Great caverns and canyons such as the Grand Canyon in the United States and Vikos Gorge in Greece (reportedly the deepest canyon in the world) existed all across the globe. How did these majestic formations get there?

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
by Guy Deutscher
Published 29 Aug 2010

His younger contemporary, the German Johann Gottfried Herder, concurred that “the intellect and the character of every nation are stamped in its language.” Industrious nations, he said, “have an abundance of moods in their verbs, while more refined nations have a large amount of nouns that have been exalted to abstract notions.” In short, “the genius of a nation is nowhere better revealed than in the physiognomy of its speech.” The American Ralph Waldo Emerson summed it all up in 1844: “We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.” The only problem with this impressive international unanimity is that it breaks down as soon as thinkers move on from the general principles to reflect on the particular qualities (or otherwise) of particular languages, and about what these linguistic qualities can tell about the qualities (or otherwise) of particular nations.

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars
by Lee Billings
Published 2 Oct 2013

She made arrangements for babysitters, and found nurses to provide palliative care. Having watched her father succumb to cancer, she knew this was the calm before the storm. Some evenings she would walk to nearby Walden Pond, to the same still water and sweet scents of oak and hickory that the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau had so cherished more than a century before. One day, she promised herself, whether with her two boys or any grandchildren, she would stand beneath the dark sky of Walden Pond and, pointing to a bright point of light, tell them that star possessed a planet very much like the Earth.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

Such a misreading of American history is epitomized by Leo Marx’s influential The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964). Too many of Marx’s conclusions derive from his otherwise insightful readings of a handful of great writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Such men were hardly representative of ordinary Americans. By definition, as great writers they transcended their own times and places, and they themselves were hardly averse to all forms of technology. Their principal target was the intrusion of the railroad into pastoral settings. This distortion of American history leads to the kind of pseudoromantic quest for a pre-technological past that was popular with the “counterculture” of the 1960s.

The Mystery of Charles Dickens
by A. N. Wilson
Published 3 Jun 2020

He sent her eleven letters during this period, as well as a cheque for £1,000 – all sent via Wills to whom (10 December) he confided, ‘my spirits flutter woefully towards a certain place at which you dined one day not long before I left with the present writer and a third (most drearily missed) person’.31 Dolby sailed on the China and arrived at Boston harbour on 23 October 1867. The point of starting in Boston was that it was supposedly a city where Dickens had many literary acquaintances – his publisher James T. Fields and his amusing, hospitable young wife in their house in Charles Street; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louis Agassiz, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Bret Harte, James Russell Lowell and others – and where he could spend two weeks of relaxation before the ardours of the readings commenced. Dolby secured Dickens an officer’s cabin on the deck of the Cuba, but he left Liverpool with a sad heart, and he was going to be homesick, and ill, for most of the cold months he was away.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben
Published 15 Apr 2019

He bumped into Sam Staples, Concord’s constable and tax collector, who reminded him that he hadn’t paid the annual poll tax required of all males between the ages of twenty and seventy. True, said Thoreau, he hadn’t, because as an abolitionist, “I cannot for an instant recognize as my government that which is the slave’s government also.” So, he was led off to jail, and there he spent the night. His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson is said to have visited and asked why he was there, only to be asked in return, “Why are you not?” In any event, as Thoreau later wrote, he was thinking of solutions that went well beyond the simple democratic rule his New England ancestors had fought for: Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut
by Nicholas Schmidle
Published 3 May 2021

Colleagues gathered for a small ceremony in Mojave and afterward, as a tribute, released dozens of red balloons into the sky. A larger service took place in the nearby minor-league baseball stadium. Chairs were set up in the infield. Saling and her kids sat behind home plate. A bagpiper wore a bearskin and played “Amazing Grace.” Branson attended, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson: “It is not the length of a life but the depth of life.” A flag that flew over the US Capitol on the day of Alsbury’s death was folded crisply and presented to Saling in a triangular pine box. Stucky spoke on behalf of SETP, which Stucky presided over and into which Alsbury had recently been inducted.

The Stolen Year
by Anya Kamenetz
Published 23 Aug 2022

We can credit him with the 170-year enduring fad of inscrutable wooden toys painted in primary colors. Peabody was elated. She was an abolitionist and the first woman to host a Transcendental Club meeting. She had published Henry David Thoreau’s writings, translated Buddhist sutras, and studied Greek under Ralph Waldo Emerson. Now she had found her life’s work. By the next year Peabody had opened up her own English-language kindergarten, the first in the United States. She went to Germany to observe the original model and traveled the United States stumping for the idea and training teachers. The early-education visionaries who founded kindergartens, and a few decades on, Montessori schools and other “infant schools,” were completely right about some things.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
by Nouriel Roubini
Published 17 Oct 2022

Reneging on promises to retirees and soon-to-be retired workers—even lengthening the retirement age—invites political unrest. To make ends meet we increasingly rely on the only remaining alternative: additional debt we can never repay. Caveat emptor—this won’t end well. “Nature abhors the old,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote when the industrial revolution was in its youth. Modern observers are reaching the same conclusion for reasons that the author of Self-Reliance could not have foreseen. Many workers in advanced economies are approaching advanced and retirement age, especially in Japan and Europe but also the United States.

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives
by Chris Stedman
Published 19 Oct 2020

As Turnbull writes: “Our experience of the world and our representations of it are mutually interdependent, so there is a sense in which the two are inseparable. Or, to put it in its most contentious form, ‘the map is the territory.’” Just as we construct ourselves via social media, social media constructs us in return. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, we become what we worship. The more we see ourselves in a certain way, and are seen by others in this way, the truer it feels. When I’m told online that I’m a good writer, it feels closer to being true; on the other hand, the more I’m inundated by trolls calling me weak or stupid, the more true that can feel.

The Wine-Dark Sea Within: A Turbulent History of Blood
by Dhun Sethna
Published 6 Jun 2022

The plethora of drawings and notes were hidden and unread, consigned first to the Ambrosian Library at Milan and later to the Royal Library at Windsor, finally to be uncovered as a testament of the greatest mind of his time. twelve The Proper Study of Man Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the Bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution. —Ralph Waldo Emerson The year 1543 need not have been remarkable, and for many people around the world it meant little. But for Christendom it meant a great deal. For the year 1543 saw the appearance of the astronomer Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, and the printing presses of Jay Oporinus at Basel gave to the world a folio volume De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (The seven books on man’s bodily works) written by a dynamic young superstar named Andreas Vesalius: an anatomist by profession, a humanist by passion.

USA's Best Trips
by Sara Benson
Published 23 May 2010

The fantastically detailed route stops at various sites throughout Lowell featured in five of his novels. Woodsy Concord, just a short jaunt down Rte 3, is another step back in time. Nestled within the quaint collection of pitches and gables are the former residences of two of New England’s most beloved authors. Check out the Ralph Waldo Emerson Homes, which boasts most of the original furnishings purchased by the writer, and a luscious organic garden planted by Henry David Thoreau for Nathaniel Hawthorne (he also inhabited the estate). Louisa May Alcott wrote her famous semiautobiographical Little Women in her home Orchard House, which is now part of a small estate of historical buildings called Louisa May Alcott Homes.

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Self-guided maps are also available. http://ecommunity.uml.edu/jklowell; Lowell, MA Louisa May Alcott Homes The setting of bestselling Little Women, Alcott’s home is now a museum detailing her life surrounded by Transcendentalism. 978-369-4118; www.louisamayalcott.org; 399 Lexington Rd, Concord, MA; adult/child $9/5; 10am-4:30pm Mon-Sat, 1-4:30pm Sun Apr-Oct, reduced winter hours; Mark Twain House & Museum This museum carefully illustrates Mark Twain’s life in Hartford through photos, films, artifacts and manuscripts. 860-247-0998; www.marktwainhouse.org; 351 Farmington Ave, Hartford, CT; adult/child $14/8; 9:30am-5:30pm Mon-Sat, noon-5:30pm Sun, closed Tue Jan-Mar Montague Bookmill This bookstore is a converted cedar gristmill from 1842 with many rooms of used books on offer. 413-367-9206; www.montaguebookmill.com; 440 Greenfield Rd, Montague, MA; 10am-6pm The Mount Award-winning writer Edith Wharton came to Lenox in 1899 and built this palatial estate where she entertained a colorful array of guests. 413-551-1111; www.edithwharton.org; 2 Plunkett St, Lenox, MA; adult/child $18/free; 9am-5pm May-Oct Ralph Waldo Emerson Homes Emerson’s home boasts original furnishings and a luscious organic garden planted by Henry David Thoreau for Nathaniel Hawthorne. 978-369-2236; www.rwe.org/emersonhouse; 28 Cambridge Turnpike, Concord, MA; adult/child $7/free; 10am-4:30pm Thu-Sat, 1-4:30pm Sun mid-Apr–Oct Walden Pond This stunning, silent glacial pond made famous by Henry David Thoreau and surrounded by multicolored trees was the epicenter of Transcendental thought. 978-369-3254; www.mass.gov/dcr/parks/northeast/wldn.htm; 915 Walden St, Concord, MA; admission free, parking $5; dawn-dusk; EAT & DRINK Fruitlands Tearoom This restaurant sits on a former Transcendentalist commune founded by Louisa May Alcott’s father. 978-456-3924; 102 Prospect Hill Rd, Harvard, MA; lunch $11-14; Apr-Oct Map Room Café A quaint coffee shop in the heart of the Boston Public Library.

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government
by David Talbot
Published 5 Sep 2016

Michael’s parents, George Lyman Paine Jr. and Ruth Forbes Paine, were the kind of odd ducks that Mary liked collecting—quirky offspring of prominent New England heritage with minds as restless as hers. Lyman was an architect and a gentleman Trotskyite whose political activities earned him a place on the FBI’s watch list. Ruth Forbes Paine hailed from a Boston blue-blood family that had made its fortune from the China tea and opium trade, and counted Ralph Waldo Emerson among its progenitors. She would give herself over to the pursuit of world peace and the exploration of human consciousness. In the 1920s, Mary was a regular at the salons presided over by Lyman and Ruth in their spacious studio apartment on the Upper East Side—gatherings that drew a colorful menagerie, including artists, trust-fund revolutionaries, truth seekers, and other devotees of the esoteric.

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Bobby waded, virtually unprotected, into frenzied crowds on every stop of his campaign; his presidential race was perhaps the bravest, and most reckless, in American history. “Living every day is like Russian roulette,” he told political reporter Jack Newfield. RFK was so moved by something Ralph Waldo Emerson had written that he copied it down and carried it with him: “Always do what you are afraid to do.” Bobby’s courage gave strength to those around him, to those ambitious, idealistic men who had served his brother and were now following RFK on his perilous path. His heroism inspired their own.

Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City
by Neal Bascomb
Published 2 Jan 2003

Since ancient Greece, these ornamental slabs had extended out over roofs, and its removal on the Albemarle drew praise for the firm. Soon more commissions for office buildings, banks, hotels, restaurants, stores, and country residences came their way—including the J. M. Gidding Building in midtown, a Fifth Avenue shop front said to have the same breathless inventiveness as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poetry, and a Long Island estate praised for its simplicity. In letters to potential clients, after detailing their list of services and expected charges, Severance & Van Alen would proudly conclude: “Our office is entirely organized, having the Departments to furnish all of the services as outlined; and we have had a wide experience . . . of considerable magnitude with various clients [to] whom . . . we take pleasure in referring you for any outside information regarding our qualification for this work.”

Unweaving the Rainbow
by Richard Dawkins
Published 7 Aug 2011

But the brains of children, those mental caterpillars, also evolve to become good at being infected by language: co-evolution yet again. C. S. Lewis, in 'Bluspels and Flalansferes' (1939), reminds us of the philologist's aphorism that our language is full of dead metaphors. In his 1844 essay 'The Poet', the philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said, 'Language is fossil poetry.' If not all of our words, certainly a great number of them, began as metaphors. Lewis mentions 'attend' as having once meant 'stretch'. If I attend to you, I stretch my ears towards you. I 'grasp' your meaning as you 'cover' your topic and 'drive home' your 'point'.

All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture
by Harold Goldberg
Published 5 Apr 2011

But it was Wright’s games that set the stage. In Wright’s inventions the literary-minded, the sociology-minded, and the science-minded could discover fragments of their most beloved theories. In Wright’s games one could see the slow, sad suburban irony of Raymond Carver and John Cheever, and even the transcendent hope of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In that sense the moniker “God Games” was a misnomer. Wright’s creations, especially SimCity and The Sims, were more about the human condition, about evolution and about the meaning of play, than they were about simply taking the role of an omniscient being. These games were Human Games, not God Games.

The death and life of the great American school system: how testing and choice are undermining education
by Diane Ravitch
Published 2 Mar 2010

Without the effort to teach our common cultural heritage, we risk losing it and being left with nothing in common but an evanescent and often degraded popular culture. Let us instead read, reflect on, and debate the ideas of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Henry David Thoreau, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. DuBois, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Lewis Carroll, and many others whose writings remain important because of their ideas, their beauty, or their eloquence. Let us be sure that our students read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other basic documents of our nation’s founding and development.

The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness Out of Blame
by Pete Walker
Published 1 Jan 1995

“Of course I love you,” and “I am only doing this because I love you,” are cliches that many of us heard innumerable times in circumstances that were anything but loving. CIRCUMNAVIGATING MY LONELINESS Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. – Ralph Waldo Emerson When I finally escaped my family and the army, I went out On The Road as a Dharma Bum pursuing the adventures that Jack Kerouac described in the aforementioned novels. I was a self-proclaimed “loner” and proud of it, bent on finding meaning in life by emulating the hedonistic adventures and quasi-spiritual quests of the characters in these books.

Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot
by Mark Vanhoenacker
Published 1 Jun 2015

Or you might think of air not as length or sphere but as depth. Here, again, there is truth and comfort in the natural analogy with water. Evangelista Torricelli, the inventor of the barometer, framed this in a 1644 letter: “Noi viviamo sommersi nel fondo d’un pelago d’aria.” We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air. Ralph Waldo Emerson, too, would speak of our enveloping air-sea, a few centuries later, in “this ocean of air above…this tent of dropping clouds.” There’s a particular kind of airport weather report known as a surface actual: the latest dispatch from the surface of the earth, from the bottom of the air-ocean. When you put your mouth over an empty plastic water bottle and inhale, the bottle collapses.

Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business
by John Mackey , Rajendra Sisodia and Bill George
Published 7 Jan 2014

These life-affirming virtues seldom appear in our lives automatically; we usually have to consciously work to cultivate them within ourselves. Ultimately, the aspiration to embody these virtues is what helps raise us to a higher level. It is essential that we strive to embody the higher virtues and practice living them every day. This isn’t easy; it requires determination, consistency, persistence, and willpower. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.” Cultivating character through the intentional use of will is no longer a particularly fashionable idea, especially with many intellectuals who are apt to poke fun at the self-help books that advocate this.

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics
by Jonathan Aldred
Published 1 Jan 2009

For surveys see Frey and Benz (2004) and Rabin (2002). 18 As argued influentially in Hahn and Hollis (1979), Ch 1. 19 This approach to consumer theory was first proposed by Lancaster (1966). 20 Interview with Sir John Krebs, then Director of the Food Standards Agency, Prospect, April 2005. 21 Becker and Murphy (1988). We will soon meet Gary Becker’s striking ideas again. 22 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Wealth’ in The Conduct of Life (1860), Boston, Ticknor and Fields. 23 Karl Marx (1847) Wage Labour and Capital, Ch 6. 24 Frederick and Loewenstein (1999), Barber (2007). 25 Brickman et al (1978). See also Frederick and Loewenstein (1999), p312, who cite a large number of studies reaching the same conclusions. 26 Loewenstein and Schkade (1999), p90. 27 Schkade and Kahneman (1998). 28 Frank (1999), Ch 6; Frederick and Loewenstein (1999) Clark, et al (2008). 29 Van Praag and Frijters (1999). 30 Frank (1999), Ch 6. 31 Frederick and Loewenstein (1999), pp314-317. 32 See deBotton (2004) and Marmot (2004). 33 For balanced discussion of various aspects of this debate see Anand (1993a), Schmid (2004), Hargreaves-Heap et al (1992) and Hausman and McPherson (2006). 34 Note for economists: it might be objected that behavioural economics is beginning to influence the entire profession.

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It)
by William Poundstone
Published 1 Jan 2010

SUBJECT: Actually, it is reasonable. LICHTENSTEIN: Can I persuade you that that is an irrational pattern? SUBJECT: No, I don’t think you probably could . . . You may be wondering whether we should cut those poor preference-reversal subjects a little slack. (“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, endearing him to the inconsistent ever since.) There are a few things to be said for the quaint virtue of self-consistency, though. Inconsistency in prices is different from inconsistency in music tastes. Behind every corner stands a sharp character ready to profit from prices gone askew.

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom
by Simon Winchester
Published 1 Jan 2008

It was shattered by the bitter rivalries of a dozen regional fiefdoms; it was seething with the conflicting ambitions of newly imported ideologies; greedy foreign powers were gnawing away at its major cities and at its outer edges. The culminating humiliation was the Japanese invasion, begun formally in 1937, which by the time Needham arrived had resulted in the military occupation of one-third of the country. “This booby nation,” the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson had complained in 1824. He was well ahead of his time. Most of his generation saw China as an exotic Oriental enigma, pushed well beyond the mainstream of global culture, an irrelevant place that could offer to the outside world little more than silk, porcelain, tea, and rhubarb, and all wrapped in a coverlet of unfathomable mystery.

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars
by Dava Sobel
Published 6 Dec 2016

The fifteen thousand index cards she inherited in 1900 had since multiplied many times over, and now numbered around two hundred thousand. She maintained as well a much smaller collection of astronomical verse—poems by Milton, Longfellow, Tennyson, and others—within the covers of a slim notebook. She liked these lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature” well enough to transcribe them: “Teach me your mood, O patient stars! / Who climb each night the ancient sky, / Leaving on space no shade, no scars, / No trace of age, no fear to die.” Now in her seventies, Miss Cannon still reported to the observatory six days a week. Every spring she selected a new Pickering Fellow and a new recipient for financial aid from Nantucket nonagenarian Lydia Hinchman.

The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer
by Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and Dr. Elissa Epel
Published 3 Jan 2017

If you practice any of these Labs regularly, they should enhance your cellular health as well as your daily wellbeing. Studies have found that lifestyle changes can have an effect on telomere maintenance (that means increased telomerase or telomere length) as soon as three weeks to four months. Remember, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Don’t be too timid or squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” PART II YOUR CELLS ARE LISTENING TO YOUR THOUGHTS ASSESSMENT: Your Stress Response Style Revealed Part Two, “Your Cells Are Listening to Your Thoughts,” offers insights into how you experience stress and how you can shift that experience to be healthier for your telomeres and more beneficial in your daily life.

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 2014

For that matter, you could avoid cliché altogether by adapting one of the other images in the full sentence: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume on the violet, to smooth the ice, or add another hue unto the rainbow, or with taper-light to seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” Thoughtless clichés can even be dangerous. I sometimes wonder how much irrationality in the world has been excused by the nonsensical saying “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” a corruption of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s remark about “a foolish consistency.” Recently a White House official referred to the American Israel Political Affairs Committee as “the 800-pound gorilla in the room,” confusing the elephant in the room (something that everyone pretends to ignore) with an 800-pound gorilla (something that is powerful enough to do whatever it wants, from the joke “Where does an 800-pound gorilla sit?”).

The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations
by Jacob Soll
Published 28 Apr 2014

He is the foe of deceit and the champion of honesty.”21 The bookkeeper as a financial Sherlock Holmes, bringing light and reason to the mysteries of finance, became a powerful idea among education reformers and the influential pioneers of the new profession of accounting. From a prestigious family, Charles Waldo Haskins—the nephew of Ralph Waldo Emerson—was among the first Chartered Public Accountants. An erudite and learned philosopher of accounting, he wrote works on how to do both financial and domestic accounting. Haskins’s Business Education and Accountancy (1904) bemoaned “men of business” who derided “men of education.” He believed that through accounting, businessmen had to unite with “men of science” to create a method of business administration.

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
by Edward Slingerland
Published 31 May 2021

The intoxicated…faced up to how they ordered the world and where they belonged in that world; those who would fight, and die, together established their trust in each other by daring to let wine reveal who they were and what they valued.92 This is also the context in which to understand Ralph Waldo Emerson’s comment on the role of the humble apple in early American society: “Man would be more solitary, less friended, less supported, if the land yielded only the useful maize and potato, [and] withheld this ornamental and social fruit.”93 Apple blossoms provided beauty, and the fruit cider and applejack.

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator
by Keith Houston
Published 22 Aug 2023

Riley, vol. 34 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1855), http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0978.phi001.perseus-eng1:34.16. 32 James Grout, “The Temple of Janus (Janus Geminus),” Encyclopaedia Romana, accessed February 28, 2021, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/imperialfora/nerva/geminus.html; James Grout, “Roman Calendar,” Encyclopaedia Romana, accessed February 28, 2021, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/calendar/romancalendar.html. 33 Plutarch, William Watson Goodwin, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Plutarch’s Morals: Translated from Greek by Several Hands, vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1874), 189. 34 “Myriad, n. and Adj.,” OED Online, June 2003, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/124528. 35 William Smith, William Wayte, and G. E. Marindin, “frumenta´riae leges,” A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (London: John Murray, 1890). 36 Adolf Berger, “Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 43, no. 2 (March 1, 1953): “tessera nummaria,” https://doi.org/10.2307/1005773. 37 Ifrah and Bellos, Universal History of Numbers, 55. 38 J.

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
by Bill Bryson
Published 8 Sep 2010

Jackson—soon to become famous as Stonewall Jackson—and one of the eager onlookers in the crowd was John Wilkes Booth. So the capture of the federal armory at Harpers Ferry served as quite a neat overture for all that followed. Meanwhile, in the wake of Brown’s little adventure, all hell was breaking loose. Northern abolitionists like Ralph Waldo Emerson made Brown a martyr, and Southern loyalists got up in arms, quite literally, at the idea that this might be the start of a trend. Before you knew it, the nation was at war. Harpers Ferry remained at the center of things throughout the exuberantly bloody conflict that followed. Gettysburg was just thirty miles to the north, Manassas a similar distance to the south, and Antietam (where, it is worth noting, twice as many men died in one day as the total American losses in the War of 1812, Mexican War, and Spanish-American War combined) was just ten miles away.

Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century
by Vicki Robin , Joe Dominguez and Monique Tilford
Published 31 Aug 1992

Both the Old Testament (“Give me neither poverty nor wealth, but only enough”) and the teachings of Jesus (“Ye cannot serve both God and money”) extol the value of material simplicity in enriching the life of the spirit. In American history well-known individuals (Benjamin Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost) as well as groups (Amish, Quakers, Hutterites, Mennonites) have carried forward the virtue of thrift—both out of respect for the earth and out of a thirst for a touch of heaven. And the challenges of building our nation required frugality of most of our citizens. Indeed, the wealth we enjoy today is the result of centuries of frugality.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
by Susan Cain
Published 24 Jan 2012

Many of the earliest conduct guides were religious parables, like The Pilgrim’s Progress, published in 1678, which warned readers to behave with restraint if they wanted to make it into heaven. The advice manuals of the nineteenth century were less religious but still preached the value of a noble character. They featured case studies of historical heroes like Abraham Lincoln, revered not only as a gifted communicator but also as a modest man who did not, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “offend by superiority.” They also celebrated regular people who lived highly moral lives. A popular 1899 manual called Character: The Grandest Thing in the World featured a timid shop girl who gave away her meager earnings to a freezing beggar, then rushed off before anyone could see what she’d done.

Alistair Cooke's America
by Alistair Cooke
Published 1 Oct 2008

It’s hard to say whether the prairie communities yearned for city amenities, or whether the amenities were thrust upon them. At any rate, the era inspired a rush of inventors and the heyday of the Ingenious American. When Samuel Morse flicked the switch that passed out the first telegraph message, somebody said that Maine could now talk to Florida. In Boston Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked, ‘Yes, but has Maine anything to say to Florida?’ It is a good question, and one worth asking again in an America that floods the television screen with words and pictures from dawn to dawn, mainly because the television screen is there. But, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, New York and Chicago had lots to say to each other, and to Denver and San Francisco, and the whistle-stops in between.

Together
by Vivek H. Murthy, M.D.
Published 5 Mar 2020

Each of us has a lot to feel grateful for. We each have a lot to offer. And when we reach out to one another from a place of self-knowledge and compassion, we have the power to transform our lives and heal the world. Chapter 7 Circles of Connection The only way to have a friend is to be one. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Of Friendship” The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing, and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares. —Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude If we imagine human connections forming through a process that starts within each of us then reaches out to others and loops us closer together, what would we call that process?

Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction
by David Enrich
Published 18 Feb 2020

The memorial service was held on February 8. Hundreds of guests, bundled against the freezing wind, hurried into the redbrick Presbyterian church on Park Avenue. As they entered, each person was handed a laminated card with a picture of a smiling, suit-wearing Bill on one side, and on the other a famous Ralph Waldo Emerson poem about the meaning of a successful life. The church’s long rows of wooden pews filled, and mourners crowded into the balconies. Bill’s brother Bob stood in the pulpit. He recounted the stories about Bill’s subcontracting of his newspaper route and his insistence on picking up the tab for a relative’s medical care.

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia
by Adrian Shirk
Published 15 Mar 2022

You’ll often find that, for instance, a permaculture intentional community in rural Oregon bought the land from the Jesus People Shiloh Youth Revival, and that they bought it from some descendants of the Aurora Colony, and so forth. There have, to be clear, been a lot of experiments, especially in the mid-nineteenth century. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote a letter to Thomas Carlyle in 1840, saying, “We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform . . . Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.” He wrote this letter while he himself was experimenting at Brook Farm in Western Massachusetts, and while the country was entering into what writer Amanda Kolson Hurley calls “Peak Commune.”

The Theory of the Leisure Class
by Thorstein Veblen
Published 10 Oct 2007

When caught up in further scandals at Stanford University over the women who swarmed around him, he wrote to a friend, ‘The president doesn’t approve of my domestic arrangements; nor do I.’ From John Dos Passos, The Bitter Drink: A Biography of Thorstein Veblen (San Francisco, 1939), 12. 9 The original Dial was the voice for the Transcendentalists, edited by Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson between 1840 and 1844. It reappeared in 1880 in Chicago as a conservative magazine of literary criticism, but by 1918 with its move to New York City it had become a radical journal featuring major writers and social critics. 10 Andrew Veblen, Veblen’s elder brother who became a well-known mathematician, wrote a useful account, The Veblen Family: Immigrant Pioneers from Valdris.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
by Safi Bahcall
Published 19 Mar 2019

Announcing a vision and organizing believers in the New England of this era was not uncommon. In Maine, the visions of Ellen White launched Seventh-day Adventism. In New York, visions of Revelation inspired followers of Jemima Wilkinson to build a town called Jerusalem. At the Harvard Divinity School, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (son of a minister) lectured that the true message of the living Jesus was that anyone could have spiritual visions and awaken others: “Cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.” Those other visionaries, however, stayed local. Smith’s visions directed him west, to seek a New Jerusalem for his people.

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made
by Ben Rhodes
Published 1 Jun 2021

The slaves who built the White House and the American economy, and the strivers who crossed the Rio Grande. Tuskegee Airmen and the Japanese who fought for America while their families were interned back home. Writers and poets. The creators of jazz and blues, of bluegrass and country, of hip-hop and rock and roll. Langston Hughes and Ralph Waldo Emerson. John Lewis. The exercise had a delirious quality to it. As it proceeded, I saw the simple radicalism of what Obama wanted to do. We were creating a new American canon, our own hall of secular saints, the mirror image of autocrats who build monuments to a particular view of power. Orban and his remaking of Budapest’s statues.

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration
by Jake Bittle
Published 21 Feb 2023

The government cannot protect every home from destruction, but it can protect every person from the worst consequences of losing their home. A guarantee like this sounds radical because it undermines a belief that has long been foundational to the American psyche, and has helped fuel the idea of unfettered expansion: the belief in individual responsibility. The philosophy of individualism that descended from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Horatio Alger to Milton Friedman remains foundational to the political culture of this country. One of the defining principles of American life over the past two centuries has been that each man is responsible for pursuing his own happiness and that, barring an act of God, it is his own fault if he does not attain it.

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America
by Garrett Neiman
Published 19 Jun 2023

When rich white men like Pat decide whom to select as the next board member or chief executive, which up-and-coming leaders to sponsor and mentor, which politicians to back, which philanthropic initiatives to fund, or even whom to interrupt in a meeting, these biases—implicit and explicit—shape trajectories. When there’s a bias at the top, that bias typically ripples through the culture of the organization. “An institution,” American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “is the lengthened shadow of one man.” And when that bias is embedded in leading national institutions—like it is in the United States Supreme Court, where male justices interrupt female justices three times as often as they do each other2—its effects ripple through entire societies.

Influence: Science and Practice
by Robert B. Cialdini
Published 1 Jan 1984

Albert Einstein “The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are sometimes right.” Winston Churchill How does the photograph that opens this chapter reflect the topic of the chapter? * * * Figure 1.2 Charity Request Appeal * * * Chapter 2 Reciprocation The Old Give and Take . . .and Take Pay every debt, as if God wrote the bill. –Ralph Waldo Emerson SEVERAL YEARS AGO, A UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR TRIED A LITTLE experiment. He sent Christmas cards to a sample of perfect strangers. Although he expected some reaction, the response he received was amazing—holiday cards addressed to him came pouring back from people who had never met nor heard of him.

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
by William Rosen
Published 31 May 2010

It was a triumph for the ironmongers of the Severn Valley, the weavers of Lancashire, the colliers of Newcastle, and the miners of Cornwall. It was even a triumph for John Locke and Edward Coke, whose ideas ignited the Rocket just as much as its firebox did. When the American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson met Stephenson in 1847, he remarked, “he had the lives of many men in him.”43 Perhaps that’s what he meant. * The names of eighteenth-century Cornish mines are as personal, and as obscure, as the names given to thoroughbred racehorses and recreational sailboats. * Or, indeed, any form of thermal or electromagnetic energy.

A People's History of Poverty in America
by Stephen Pimpare
Published 11 Nov 2008

They are degraded for, in the literal sense, they live outside the grades or categories which the community regards as acceptable.34 Dwight Macdonald, in a New Yorker review of Galbraith’s The Affluent Society and Harrington’s The Other America, said it more succinctly: “Not to be able to afford a movie or a glass of beer is a kind of starvation—if everybody else can.”35 Nineteenth-century novelist William Dean Howells suggested that “poverty is not the lack of things, it is the fear and the dread of want.”36 “Poverty consists in feeling poor,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.37 Even Adam Smith concedes the utility of such an approach: “Every man is rich or poor according to the degree to which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life.”38 He elaborates later in Wealth of Nations:By necessaries I understand, not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order to be without.

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
by Laszlo Bock
Published 31 Mar 2015

Zechariah Chafee Jr., “Freedom of Speech in War Time,” Harvard Law Review 32, no. 8 (1919): 932–973, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1327107?seq=26&. 249. “Our Work: What We Believe,” McKinsey & Company, http://www.mckinsey.com.br/our_work_belive.asp. 250. Andrew Hill, “Inside McKinsey,” FT Magazine, November 25, 2011, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0d506e0e-1583-11e1-b9b8-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2iCZ5ks73. 251. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays (1841), republished as Essays: First Series (Boston: James Munroe and Co., 1847). 252. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-wood-behind-fewer-arrows.html. 253. Mixed metaphor, I know. I use it because I find that few management practices are completely binary.

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People?
by John Kay
Published 2 Sep 2015

The UK, as often, lies somewhere in between the two. The remainder of this chapter is concerned with the functioning of the deposit channel (and the payment system that is inextricably linked to it), while Chapter 7 reviews the operation of the investment channel. The payment system Money often costs too much. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, 1860 Paul Volcker, the tall, laconic figure who preceded Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has been reported as saying that the only useful recent financial innovation was the ATM.4 Volcker is deeply sceptical of the developments in wholesale financial markets that excited the celebrants at Jackson Hole.

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter
by Susan Pinker
Published 30 Sep 2013

But he and a tag team of successors also shone the spotlight on the kids’ family backgrounds, their physical and mental health as they grew up, their stress levels, and ultimately their sex and marital lives, career choices, and political and religious beliefs. The researchers kept up this intrusive level of inquiry for the next eighty-odd years, accumulating a treasure trove of correlations (the project is still going, having been handed off to the next generation of researchers). Not all of what was revealed was pretty, bringing to mind Ralph Waldo Emerson’s aphorism “Sorrow makes us all children again—destroys all differences of intellect.” Slightly fewer of these bright students survived to the age of one hundred than other Americans born in 1910, and the ones who did were more likely to be women.36 Still, in this teeming mountain of data, Terman’s first concern was giftedness, and he was able to show that these talented kids didn’t conform to the stereotype of the era: the super-smart kid as the neurotic, bespectacled, antisocial nerd.

The Abandonment of the West
by Michael Kimmage
Published 21 Apr 2020

Hitler had unwittingly brokered both the Popular Front and a certain commonality of national interest between the Soviet Union and the United States.8 AFTER WORLD WAR I, the United States was more reluctant than the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to seek leadership of the West. A Western frame for the American relationship to Europe would prevail by the war’s end, but initially a more limited Anglo-Saxon frame was stronger. Anglo-Saxonism had a long history in the United States. Thomas Jefferson referred to “our Saxon ancestors,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson believed, in historian Nell Painter’s words, in “the chain of association linking Saxons and Protestants, Protestantism to the English church, the English church to the Magna Carta, and the Magna Carta to ‘liberty.’” Anglo-Saxonism was also in tune with the spirit of racial segregation that was intensifying in the 1920s, comfortably aligned with the Anglophilia and Protestant tenor of the American political elite.

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
by Edward Tenner
Published 1 Sep 1997

Still other plants endangered in their original habitats may ultimately be saved from extinction by their persistence as wild vegetation in abandoned English gardens. Sometimes weeds may be promoted, and the Netherlands has picking gardens, from which children and adults can take colorful weed flowers home. The motto of weed appreciators everywhere must be Ralph Waldo Emerson's definition—a plant whose uses are not yet known.3 There are also important differences between animal and plant pests that must not be overlooked. Weeds seize open, disturbed territory; they usually do not compete aggressively with native wild plants. Development divides habitats into smaller zones separated by roads, housing, and industry.

Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them
by Dan Bouk
Published 22 Aug 2022

A missing word within an overly elaborate form appears to have been at the root of the misleading evidence pointing to an epidemic of idiocy and insanity in free Black communities, an epidemic that never existed. The fight over slavery fueled the controversy, but it likely began with a failure in the data management system. In 1850, the census began enumerating each free individual by name. The great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson called this time the “age of the first person singular.”20 It stemmed from and contributed to a great expansion of American democracy, a period during which free men, regardless of how little property they owned, asserted and frequently achieved a universal right to the franchise.21 That was a significant extension of democracy, which the census took even further by naming every free individual, not just those who could vote.

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
by Steven Pinker
Published 14 Oct 2021

By disjunctive addition, you can go from P to P or Q, “Hextable is in England or unicorns exist.” Then, by the disjunctive syllogism, you can go from P or Q and not P to Q: “Hextable is not in England. Therefore, unicorns exist.” Congratulations! You just logically proved that unicorns exist. People often misquote Ralph Waldo Emerson as saying, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” In fact he wrote about a foolish consistency, which he advised “great souls” to transcend, but either way, the putdown is dubious.7 If your belief system contains a contradiction, you can believe anything. (Morgenbesser once said of a philosopher he didn’t care for, “There’s a guy who asserted both P and not P, and then drew out all the consequences.”)8 The way that valid rules of inference can yield absurd conclusions exposes an important point about logical arguments.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
by Edward L. Glaeser
Published 1 Jan 2011

But in the twentieth century, it became a global bestseller, read by millions and taught by environmentally conscious high school teachers around the world. Thoreau loved the woods, but he was also part of an urban chain of intellectuals. He had been educated in the intellectual hothouse of early nineteenth-century Harvard. More important, he was one of a remarkable concentration of minds brought together by Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, a town filled with creative thinkers. Emerson assembled, and occasionally funded, brilliant minds, including Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, and Thoreau. Thoreau was part of Emerson’s Transcendentalist salon, but he extolled the virtues of rural isolation rather than urban interaction.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
by Ken Auletta
Published 1 Jan 2009

“It gives them a tool to avoid being swallowed by Microsoft,” Eric Schmidt said at the time. Asked in September 2008 what was the most important Google event of the previous six months, Schmidt said, “the Yahoo business deal.... It was a setback for Microsoft.” Google’s effort to have the Justice Department block Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo brought to mind Ralph Waldo Emerson’s delicious observation that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Like other corporations, Google and Microsoft extol the virtues of government’s leaving them unfettered, free to innovate—except when they call on government to intervene in order for them to gain a competitive advantage.

The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius(tm)
by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen
Published 2 Nov 1999

Experiencing art is like raising both palms with fingers extended upward until our hands are met by the hands of the Divine. Such “homecoming” encounters with beauty are depicted in the visionary words of many an Everyday Genius. For Kahlil Gibran, beauty was “eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.” Ralph Waldo Emerson saw “God’s handwriting” in beauty. And Jane Porter interpreted beauty as “the soul shining through its crystalline covering.” In her unique way, Georgia O’Keeffe possessed the genius to pull us directly into the heart and essence of her aesthetic universe. Her paintings capturing a single flower’s magnificence immediately distinguish her work and underscore the innumerable marvels of nature that surround us every day.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Published 1 Jul 2008

Teachers assure pupils that the boring classes will benefit them later, when the students are going to be looking for jobs. The company vice president tells junior employees to have patience and work hard, because one of these days they will be promoted to the executive ranks. At the end of the long struggle for advancement, the golden years of retirement beckon. “We are always getting to live,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson used to say, “but never living.” Or as poor Frances learned in the children’s story, it is always bread and jam tomorrow, never bread and jam today. Of course this emphasis on the postponement of gratification is to a certain extent inevitable. As Freud and many others before and after him have noted, civilization is built on the repression of individual desires.

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)
by Thierry Bardini
Published 1 Dec 2000

The narrative itself is a remarkable tale of an intuition produced almost as an act of will as the result of hard work. It is a tale with deep resonances in the American tradition of self-made technologi- cal innovators, from Edison, Bell, and the Wright Brothers onward, and be- yond that, in the tradition of self-reliance and self-invention, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby. As Engelbart describes this period, "I was never the kind that would push everybody into talking about what I wanted to talk about. I guess I was look- ing around watching people and soaking it up" (Engelbart 1996). He was opening himself to various professional and moral discourses, trying to figure out a set of personal goals for his life.

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces
by Radley Balko
Published 14 Jun 2013

The law was so skewed toward slave owners that even blacks who had been free all their lives were at risk of being consigned to slavery by false accusations. The Sims case attracted national attention among opponents of slavery. When Sims was ordered back to the plantation, prominent abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, and Henry David Thoreau wrote enraged polemics condemning the farcical proceedings, but most of Boston was complacent. The prospect of a civil war was daunting. For the time being, many in the North were willing to tolerate slave-catching as the price for avoiding bloodshed—at least blood shed by people other than slaves.

Year 501
by Noam Chomsky
Published 19 Jan 2016

Others recognized the difficulty of taking Mexico’s resources without burdening themselves with its “imbecile” population, “degraded” by “the amalgamation of races,” though the New York press was hopeful that their fate would be “similar to that of the Indians of this country—the race, before a century rolls over us, will become extinct.” Articulating the common themes of manifest destiny, Ralph Waldo Emerson had written that the annexation of Texas was simply a matter of course: “It is very certain that the strong British race which has now overrun much of this continent, must also overrun that trace, and Mexico and Oregon also, and it will in the course of ages be of small import by what particular occasions and methods it was done.”

A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
by Rebecca Solnit
Published 31 Aug 2010

He had been born in 1842 in New York City to a wealthy Irish American family, the oldest of five children—the next oldest was his brother Henry, who became as renowned as a novelist. Their father was an enthusiastic dabbler in spiritual ideas, an occasional writer of books on ethics and religion, a friend of the Tran scendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and heir to a considerable fortune. William James wavered a great deal as a young man, avoiding service in the Civil War, studying art and hoping to become a painter, then studying medicine. Medicine led him to a position in anatomy at Harvard College that eventually evolved into his long professorship in philosophy and the new discipline of psychology, in which he did pioneering work.

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
by Jane McGonigal
Published 20 Jan 2011

We need to engineer alternate realities: new, more gameful ways of interacting with the real world and living our real lives. Fortunately, the project of making alternate realities is already under way. PART TWO Reinventing Reality All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON CHAPTER SEVEN The Benefits of Alternate Realities Whenever I walk through the front door of my apartment, I enter an alternate reality. It looks and works just like regular reality, with one major exception: when I want to clean the bathroom, I have to be really sneaky about it. If my husband, Kiyash, thinks I’m going to scrub the tub on Saturday morning, he’ll wake up early, tiptoe out of the bedroom and silently beat me to it.

Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide
by Robert Michael Pyle
Published 31 Jul 2017

Without an ironclad promise to release any captive creature within a specified time, the temptation to keep the animal (and the danger of confiscation by authorities above the treaty) might frustrate the intention of peaceful encounter. Nevertheless, I feel we should try to devise a civilized and intelligent procedure to protect our unwilling quarry. For in the end, how much better for all concerned if we could hear the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson above the soundtracks of the monster movies we all grew up with: Hast thou named all the birds without a gun; Loved the wood-rose and left it on its stalk; Unarmed faced danger with a heart of trust; And loved so well a high behavior in man or maid, That thou from speech refrained, Nobility more nobly to repay?

The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
Published 12 Sep 2006

It is in the light of the unparalleled presumption of respect for religion* that I make my own disclaimer for this book. I shall not go out of my way to offend, but nor shall I don kid gloves to handle religion any more gently than I would handle anything else. CHAPTER 2 THE GOD HYPOTHESIS The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. –RALPH WALDO EMERSON The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain From the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times
by Lucy Lethbridge
Published 18 Nov 2013

Wells’s novel Tono-Bungay, the new-rich quickly learned the social cachet of the old over the showy glitter of the new: ‘Their first crude conception of dazzling suites of the newly perfect is replaced almost from the outset by a jackdaw dream of accumulating costly discrepant old things.’7 The great estates became the symbols of an Englishness where effortless caste superiority was preserved by the trappings of patronage and rich Americans fell over themselves to marry their daughters to aristocratic families who, in turn, were in need of funds. The writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, on a visit from the New World, was among those seduced by the English milord’s resistance to strenuous effort of any kind: ‘They have the sense of superiority, the absence of all the ambitious effort which disgusts in the aspiring classes, a pure tone of thought and feeling, and the power to command, among their other luxuries, the presence of the most accomplished men at their festive meetings.’8 For many of those American heiresses who did marry into the aristocracy it was often their spouses’ practical incompetence – being stumped by the simplest of daily tasks – that proved most perplexing to their new brides.

Ayn Rand Cult
by Jeff Walker
Published 30 Dec 1998

A similar exchange between Peter Loire and Humphrey Bogart occurs in the 1941 movie Casablanca. Loire: “You despise me, don’t you?” Bogart: “If I gave you any thought, I probably would.” “A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends,” the almost-a-hero Gail Wynand realizes too late. “How I treasured that sentence,” recalls Nathaniel Branden. Long before, Ralph Waldo Emerson had written, “If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens around your own,” which for a while became the adage, ‘A slave’s chains are heavy at both ends.’ Upon his death the Atlantic depicted Frank Lloyd Wright in Rand-Roarkian terms as “a Carlylean hero . . . of Wagnerian dimensions . . . forced to breast the wave of ignorance around him.”

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves
by Matthew Sweet
Published 13 Feb 2018

But no matter how much energy its operatives expended, no matter how much money it spent, or how many files it opened, Johnson and Nixon’s vision remained insubstantial. HYDRA chuntered through the data on its 9,994 names, but it couldn’t detect a ruble of Moscow gold. American radicals, it seemed, were as self-reliant as Ralph Waldo Emerson. They had decided to hate LBJ and Nixon and the Vietnam War without anyone from the Kremlin encouraging them to do it for cash. Harry Rositzke, the crossword-loving Anglo-Saxon scholar who had been attached to MHCHAOS in its earliest days, woke up to this before many of his peers. He left the CIA in 1970 to raise crossbred Angus calves on a farm near Middleburg, Virginia, but maintained a parallel career as a sympathetic commentator on agency affairs.

The Hour of Fate
by Susan Berfield

Holmes was seventeen years older than Roosevelt—sixty-one when he joined the Court in the fall of 1902—but came from the same social class and held some of the same grudges against it. Both had been18 born into aristocratic families, Holmes in Boston, and grew up with famous fathers. Holmes Sr. was a physician and essayist whose friends included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. They both studied at Harvard and belonged to its secretive Porcellian Club. They both chose to fight in wars they could have avoided. Holmes left Harvard his senior year to enlist in the Union Army. He served three years, was wounded three times, and kept the bullet that surgeons extracted from his chest and the bullet that tore through his neck.

How to Read a Book
by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren
Published 14 Jun 1972

. * *Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) Studies in Pessimism 96. * *Michael Faraday (1791-1867) Chemical History of a Candle *Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. * *Charles Lyell (1797-1875) Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte (1798-1857) The Positive Philosophy 99. * *Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) Père Goriot Eugénie Grandet 100. * *Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Representative Men Essays Journal 101. * *Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) The Scarlet Letter 102. * *Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) Democracy in America 103. * *John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) A System of Logic *On Liberty * Representative Government * Utilitarianism 103.

The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius(tm)
by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen
Published 18 Feb 2015

Experiencing art is like raising both palms with fingers extended upward until our hands are met by the hands of the Divine. Such “homecoming” encounters with beauty are depicted in the visionary words of many an Everyday Genius. For Kahlil Gibran, beauty was “eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.” Ralph Waldo Emerson saw “God’s handwriting” in beauty. And Jane Porter interpreted beauty as “the soul shining through its crystalline covering.” In her unique way, Georgia O’Keeffe possessed the genius to pull us directly into the heart and essence of her aesthetic universe. Her paintings capturing a single flower’s magnificence immediately distinguish her work and underscore the innumerable marvels of nature that surround us every day.

ANSI Common LISP
by Paul Graham
Published 12 Nov 1995

Like any structure involved in lookups, hash tables must have some notion of equality for keys. By default they use eql, but you can specify that a hash table should use eq, equal, or equalp instead by providing the optional : t e s t argument: > (setf writers (make-hash-table :test #'equal)) #<Hash-Table C005E6> > (setf (gethash '(ralph waldo emerson) writers) t ) T SUMMARY 79 This is one of the trade-offs we have to make for the efficiency of hash tables. With lists, we could specify the equality predicate in the call to member. With hash tables we have to decide ahead of time, and specify it when the hash table is created. Most of the trade-offs in Lisp programming (or life, for that matter) have this character.

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 31 Dec 1998

REVERSE ENGINEERING A PROVEN DESIGN: THE HUMAN BRAIN For many people the mind is the last refuge of mystery against the encroaching spread of science, and they don’t like the idea of science engulfing the last bit of terra incognita. —Herb Simon as quoted by Daniel Dennett Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another you. One’s enough. —Ralph Waldo Emerson For the wise men of old ... the solution has been knowledge and self-discipline , ... and in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead. —C. S. Lewis Intelligence is: (a) the most complex phenomenon in the Universe; or (b) a profoundly simple process.

CSS: The Definitive Guide
by Eric A. Meyer
Published 2 Jan 2006

Therefore, of the following two declarations, only the first is valid: quotes: '"' "'"; /* valid */ quotes: '"'; /* NOT VALID */ The first rule also illustrates one way to put string quotes around the strings themselves. The double quotation marks are surrounded by single quotation marks, and vice versa. Let's look at a simple example. Suppose you're creating an XML format to store a list of favorite quotations. Here's one entry in the list: <quotation> <quote>I hate quotations.</quote> <quotee>Ralph Waldo Emerson</quotee> </quotation> To present the data in a useful way, you could employ the following rules, with the result shown in Figure 12-20: quotation: display: block;} quote {quotes: '"' '"';} quote:before {content: open-quote;} quote:after {content: close-quote;} quotee:before {content: " (";} quotee:after {content: ")";} Figure 12-20.

The Old Patagonian Express
by Paul Theroux
Published 23 Sep 1979

After all, Juarez was a Zapotee Indian, ethnically pure, and was one of the few Mexican rulers who died a natural death. But his successor, the devious and greedy Porfirio Diaz, welcomed - for a price - those whom we now think of as philanthropists and trailblazers, the Hearsts, U.S. Steel, Anaconda Corporation, Standard Oil, and the Guggenheims. Although Ralph Waldo Emerson was writing at the time of Santa Ana's paranoid rule (Santa Ana demanded to be known as 'His Most Serene Highness' - Mexican dictators frequently affected regal titles: the creole butcher Iturbide styled himself 'Agustín I'), his lines are apposite to the Guggenheim adventure: But who is he that prates Of the culture of mankind, Of better arts and life?

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000
by John Steele Gordon
Published 12 Oct 2009

Traveling for pleasure rather than business had been nearly unknown in the colonies, but by the 1830s it was common for affluent couples to go on “nuptial journeys” (and Niagara Falls was already a popular destination for them). Doctors at that time began to prescribe travel for the health of their wealthier patients. But while individual travel increased, it was still commerce that crowded the expanding road net. In 1836 Ralph Waldo Emerson noticed an “endless procession” of wagons, passing his house in Concord, Massachusetts, headed “to all the towns of New Hampshire and Vermont.” By 1840 nearly fifteen thousand men made their living as full-time teamsters in the United States, hauling produce and freight into and out of the growing cities.

Diet for a New America
by John Robbins

Sometimes they bring us challenges, sometimes they bring us the opportunity to help them, sometimes they bring us companionship. Often, they bring us play, beauty, and laughter as they go about their business of being themselves. What we would miss if they were not here! “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand, how men would believe and adore!” So said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Can you imagine how we would feel if such were the fate of animals? What the Children Know Sometimes children understand these things better than adults do. A young Girl Scout named Karyl Carter wrote a simple report that says it all so well. A beaver who swam, dove and somersaulted among canoeing Girl Scouts—that’s what you would have seen at Camp Sacajawea Girl Scout Camp in Newfield, New Jersey, this summer.

Yucatan: Cancun & Cozumel
by Bruce Conord and June Conord
Published 31 Aug 2000

It has an extensive network of underwater caves, including one that leads under the road to Cenote Escondido on the other side. Other nearby cenotes good for swimming or viewing are Casa Cenote (north of Tulum), Dos Ojos and Car Wash (on road to Cobá). The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882 Tulum Ruins F or a bunch of old stone buildings, Tulum (“wall”) is a particularly impressive site, perched as it is high on top of limestone cliffs that spill down to the turquoise waters of the Caribbean below. The first time we entered the modest walled city, it took our breath away.

Sixty Days and Counting
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 27 Feb 2007

‘I remember well the foreign scholar who made a week of my youth happy by his visit. “The savages in the islands,” he said, “delight to play with the surf, coming in on the top of the rollers, then swimming out again, and repeat the delicious maneuver for hours.” Well, human life is made up of such transits.’—Did you hear that, Frank?” “Yes.” “Ralph Waldo Emerson, saying that life is like surfing? Is that great or what?” “Yes, that’s pretty great. That’s our man.” “Who was this guy? Do you think somebody’s making all these quotes up?” “No, I think Emerson made them up.” “It’s so perfect. He’s like your Dalai Lama.” “That’s very true.” “The Waldo Lama.

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers
by Simon Winchester
Published 27 Oct 2015

EPILOGUE: THE CALL OF THE RUNNING TIDE Behold the sea . . . opaline, plentiful and strong, Yet beautiful as the rose or the rainbow, full of food, nourisher of men, purger of the world, creating a sweet climate and in its unchangeable ebb and flow . . . giving a hint of that which changeth not and is perfect. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Journals, 1856 The ancient Hawaiian phrase malama honua speaks of humanity’s duty “to care for our island earth.” On a warm Saturday evening in mid-May 2014, a venerable sailing craft charged with spreading this simple message pulled away from her dock on the island of Oahu, her twin sails filling on a steadily gathering breeze.

Sugar: A Bittersweet History
by Elizabeth Abbott
Published 14 Sep 2011

Ice cream became so ubiquitous that in 1850, the widely read Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book pronounced it one of life’s “necessary luxuries. A party without it would be like a breakfast without bread or a dinner without a roast.”596 By then, improved technology made ice cream cheap enough for the middle classes to enjoy regularly. (Poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson did not approve: “We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend so we buy ice cream.”597) The new freezers also meant that ice cream need not be made where it was consumed but could be produced near sources of fruit and cream, then transported to distant markets. In 1851, Baltimore milk dealer Jacob Fussell opened a factory where he made ice cream from surplus cream and sold it at 25 cents a quart instead of the usual 65 cents.

The Great Railroad Revolution
by Christian Wolmar
Published 9 Jun 2014

The next couple of decades, however, would change all that, as the beast of the iron road was finally unleashed—with extraordinary consequences for America. 3 THE RAILROADS TAKE HOLD In the twenty years running up to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the railroads became an unstoppable force, conquering the whole of the Eastern Seaboard and making major inroads westward. From an experimental technology with a precarious base, railroads became mainstream and ubiquitous, sweeping through the country with the support of the population. The love affair was becoming a marriage, a symbiotic relationship that was to last almost a century. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Americans take to this contrivance, the railroad, as if it were the cradle in which they were born.”1 The impact of such a major invention took time to sink in. At the beginning, the railroad was “mostly an object of awe, excitement and mild trepidation.”2 It was unclear whether the railroads were merely a novel form of amusement, a grandiose fairground ride, or an invention that would change people’s way of life.

Fifty Degrees Below
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 25 Oct 2005

Sit up, click on the laptop, google “beatitude”; then there on the screen: “beatitude dips from on high down on us and we see. It is not in us so much as we are in it. If the air come to our lungs, we breathe and live; if not, we die. If the light come to our eyes, we see; else not. And if truth come to our mind we suddenly expand to its dimensions, as if we grew to worlds.” My. Ralph Waldo Emerson, from a website called Emersonfortheday.net. Frank read a little more: quite amazing stuff. He bookmarked the site, which apparently featured a new thought from the philosopher’s writings every few days. Earlier samples read like some miraculously profound horoscope or fortune cookie. Reading them, Frank suddenly realized that the people who had lived before him in this immense hardwood forest had had epiphanies much like his.

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead
by Alan S. Blinder
Published 24 Jan 2013

Hence, the TSLF was born—or, rather, announced; its first actual loan was not made until March 27. That date was exquisitely bad timing for one of the primary dealers that was fighting for its life at the time: an investment bank named Bear Stearns. 5 FROM BEAR TO LEHMAN: INCONSISTENCY WAS THE HOBGOBLIN A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON The six months between the collapse of Bear Stearns into the waiting arms of JP Morgan Chase and the collapse of Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy was interesting, in the sense of the apocryphal Chinese curse. (May you live in interesting times.) In March the Federal Reserve, supported by the Treasury, kicked in almost $30 billion to facilitate the shotgun marriage of Bear to JP Morgan, presumably because a disorderly failure of Bear might have devastated the financial system.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
by Antonio Garcia Martinez
Published 27 Jun 2016

THIS JOURNEY 1% FINISHED Like the naive new recruit, I took those values to heart. And like the new recruit, I’d realize only later that the Facebook reality was rather more complicated. The Barbaric Yawn To fill the hour—that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience JANUARY 2012 Track racing is an exhilarating pursuit. You take your performance car that you irresponsibly street-race all the time through busy streets filled with potholes and around turns with bad camber, and you’re suddenly on a flawless surface winding through sweeping, perfectly sloped turns with full license to go apeshit.

America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism
by Anatol Lieven
Published 3 May 2010

—Reinhold Niebuhr2 T he American Thesis has also been called the American Creed and the American Ideology. It is the set of propositions about America which the nation presents to itself and to the outside world: "Americans of all national origins, classes, religions, Creeds, and colors, have something in common: a social ethos, a political Creed."3 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of adherence to American governing principles as a form of religious conversion. This Thesis or Creed, with its attendant national myths, forms the foundation for American civic nationalism and makes the public face of the United States an example of civic nationalism par excellence.4 In theory, anyone who assents to the American Thesis can become an American, irrespective of language, culture, or national origin, just as anyone could become a Soviet citizen by assenting to communism.5 The principles of the American Thesis are also rationalist and universalist ones, held by Americans to be applicable to peoples and societies everywhere and indeed throughout time.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
by Michael Pollan
Published 30 Apr 2018

Now they paint a recognizable reality. Likewise, certain mystical passages from literature that once seemed so overstated and abstract that I read them indulgently (if at all), now I can read as a subspecies of journalism. Here are three nineteenth-century examples, but you can find them in any century. Ralph Waldo Emerson crossing a wintry New England commons in “Nature”: Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

Big companies (particularly railways) and state governments advertised for new citizens across Europe. Even intellectuals, usually the wallflowers at the capitalist ball, joined the chorus. Walt Whitman praised America’s “extreme business energy” and its “almost maniacal appetite for wealth.” Ralph Waldo Emerson lauded America as “the country of the Future . . . a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.” He traveled the country lecturing on the virtues of self-improvement and commercial progress. “There is more poetry in the rush of a single railroad across the continent,” said Joaquin Miller, a western poet, “than in all the gory story of the burning of Troy.”2 Sometime before the Great War, this brash and thrusting adolescent replaced its aging parent, Great Britain, as the world’s leading economy.

Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization
by Scott Barry Kaufman
Published 6 Apr 2020

Ultimately, Maslow came to believe that self-actualization was not, in fact, the pinnacle of the hierarchy of human needs. He realized there is a human longing for something even higher. . . . Prelude On October 23, 1928, a twenty-year-old Abe Maslow submitted a handwritten undergraduate philosophy paper to his professor. It was a response to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s acclaimed essay “The Over-Soul,” considered by many to be one of Emerson’s greatest writings. Not so for the young Abe. His essay began: I abhor, with all the vehemence that is in me, Emerson and his like. . . . Emerson, I say, is a wordy preacher, a superstitious mystic, a shoddy thinker (if I can dignify him by even calling him thinker), and finally as bad a philosopher as it is possible for a man to be.

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt
by Russell Napier
Published 19 Jul 2021

However, as was suggested in The Solid Ground Daily yesterday, the market machine has changed, leaving equities overvalued, and this is much more important at this stage than any of the variables one feeds into the machine. That investors had switched from using a risk-adjusted US Treasury yield to value Asian equities would seem obvious given the change in the exchange rate regimes. It wasn’t. Some clung onto US interest rates as the correct variable for equity valuation. Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay ‘Self-Reliance’ was right to remind us all that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. When a fixed variable in an equation is removed, never underestimate the ability of any human being to simply continue to act on the basis that it is still there. My attempt to label the Asian crisis as the Mekong crisis failed.

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul
by Tripp Mickle
Published 2 May 2022

Dedication For my wife, Amanda, and my parents, Marilynn and Russ Epigraph An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man. —Ralph Waldo Emerson The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. —George Bernard Shaw Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Epigraph Cast of Characters Prologue Chapter 1: One More Thing Chapter 2: The Artist Chapter 3: The Operator Chapter 4: Keep Him Chapter 5: Intense Determination Chapter 6: Fragile Ideas Chapter 7: Possibilities Chapter 8: Can’t Innovate Chapter 9: The Crown Chapter 10: Deals Chapter 11: Blowout Chapter 12: Pride Chapter 13: Out of Fashion Chapter 14: Fuse Chapter 15: Accountants Chapter 16: Security Chapter 17: Hawaii Days Chapter 18: Smoke Chapter 19: The Jony 50 Chapter 20: Power Moves Chapter 21: Not Working Chapter 22: A Billion Pockets Chapter 23: Yesterday Epilogue Author’s Note Acknowledgments A Note on Sources Bibliography Notes Index Photo Section About the Author Copyright About the Publisher Cast of Characters Tim Cook: Chief Executive Officer (2011–present), Senior Vice President for Worldwide Operations, COO (1998–2011) Jony Ive: Chief Design Officer (2015–2019), Senior Vice President of Design, member of design team (1992–2015) EXECUTIVES Angela Ahrendts: Senior Vice President, Retail (2014–2019) Katie Cotton: Vice President of Worldwide Communications (1996–2014) Eddy Cue: Senior Vice President, Services (2011–present, joined Apple in 1989) Steve Dowling: Vice President, Communications (2015–2019, joined Apple in 2003) Tony Fadell: Senior Vice President, iPod Division (2005–2008, joined Apple in 2001) Scott Forstall: Senior Vice President, iOS (2007–2012, joined Apple in 1997) Greg Joswiak: Senior Vice President, Worldwide Marketing (2020–present, joined Apple in 1986) Luca Maestri: Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (2014–present, joined Apple in 2013) Bob Mansfield: Senior Vice President, Hardware Engineering (2005–2012, joined Apple in 1999, remained as an adviser on future projects after 2012) Deirdre O’Brien: Senior Vice President, Retail + People (2019–present, joined Apple in 1988) Peter Oppenheimer: Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (2004–2014, joined Apple in 1996) Dan Riccio: Senior Vice President, Hardware Engineering (2012–2021, joined Apple in 1998) Jon Rubinstein: Senior Vice President, Hardware Engineering and iPod Division (1997–2006) Phil Schiller: Senior Vice President, Worldwide Marketing (1997–2020, joined Apple in 1987 and 1997) Bruce Sewell: Senior Vice President and General Counsel (2009–2017) Jeff Williams: Chief Operating Officer (2015–present, joined Apple in 1998) INDUSTRIAL DESIGN Bart Andre: Designer (1992–present) Robert Brunner: Director of Industrial Design (1990–1996) Danny Coster: Designer (1994–2016) Daniele De Iuliis: Designer (1992–2018) Julian Hönig: Designer (2010–2019) Richard Howarth: Designer (1996–present) Duncan Kerr: Designer (1999–present) Marc Newson: Designer (2014–2019), LoveFrom (2019–present) Tim Parsey: Manager, Industrial Design Studio (1991–1996) Doug Satzger: Designer (1996–2008) Christopher Stringer: Designer (1995–2017) Eugene Whang: Designer (1999–2021) Rico Zorkendorfer: Designer (2003–2019) SOFTWARE TEAM Imran Chaudhri: Designer (1995–2016) Greg Christie: Vice President, Human Interface Design (1996–2015) Alan Dye: Vice President, Human Interface Design (2012–present); Creative Director (2006–2012) Henri Lamiraux: Vice President, Software Engineering (2009–2013, joined Apple in 1990) Richard Williamson: Designer (2001–2012) MARKETERS Hiroki Asai: Vice President, Global Marketing Communications (2010–2016, joined Apple in 2000) Paul Deneve: Sales & Marketing Manager, Apple Europe (1990–1997); Vice President, Special Projects (2013–2017) Duncan Milner: Chief Creative Officer, TBWA\Media Arts Lab (2000–2016) James Vincent: CEO, TBWA\Media Arts Lab; Managing Director, TBWA\Chiat\Day, Apple (2000–2006) MUSIC MEN Dr.

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age
by Matthew Cobb
Published 15 Nov 2022

A key part of the mythology of the American Dream was – and still is – that if the little guy (or gal) comes up with a brilliant idea, they can acquire great wealth through the operation of the market, as long as the invention is protected by patent law. As the nineteenth-century American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson is supposed to have said: ‘Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.’i American universities were certainly not little guys, but what became known as the Bayh–Dole Act encouraged them to focus their attention on the possibilities of getting rich quick through patents and involvement with business, in particular through the application of genetic engineering.

Melody Beattie 4 Title Bundle: Codependent No More and 3 Other Best Sellers by Melody Beattie: A Collection of Four Melody Beattie Best Sellers
by Melody Beattie
Published 30 May 2010

Fear: January 10 Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again; you shall never be so afraid of a tumble. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Fear can be a big stopper for many of us: fear of fragility, fear of failure, fear of making a mistake, fear of what others might think, fear of success. We may second-guess our next action or word until we talk ourselves out of participating in life. “But I failed before!” “I can’t do it good enough!”

…

You may have been burned from getting too close to the fire, but getting close to the fire is the only way to get warm. Surrender to the pain. Then learn to surrender to the good. It’s there and more is on the way. Love God. Love Family. Love what you do. Love people, and learn to let them love you. And always keep loving yourself. No matter how good it gets, the best is yet to come. Endnotes 1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotable Quotes,” Reader’s Digest (March 1988). 2. Louise Hay discusses the concept of releasing, or letting go, of everything. She’s the first person I heard mention the concept of letting go of our need to be in destructive relationships, and the more general concept of letting go of our underlying, destructive needs. 3.

Alone Together
by Sherry Turkle
Published 11 Jan 2011

And seeing that an abused child has a normal brain scan does not mean one feels any less rage about the abuse. Pluralistic in our attitudes toward the self, we turn this pragmatic sensibility toward other things in our path—for example, sociable robots. We approach them like Wilson: they can be machines, and they can be more. Writing in his diary in 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson described “dreams and beasts” as “two keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our nature.... They are our test objects.”15 If Emerson had lived today, he would have seen the sociable robot as our new test object. Poised in our perception between inanimate program and living creature, this new breed of robot provokes us to reflect on the difference between connection and relationship, involvement with an object and engagement with a subject.

In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969
by Francis French , Colin Burgess and Walter Cunningham
Published 1 Jun 2010

Wally Schirra remembered Cooper in a droll but respectful way that his Mercury colleague would doubtless have appreciated: “not too bad of a water skier, not too bad of a pilot, but a heck of a good astronaut.” 2. A Rendezvous in Space Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. Ralph Waldo Emerson As a test pilot, Wally Schirra knows that almost every space mission from the mid-1960s until the present day has relied on one thing: the ability of two spacecraft to find each other in orbit. Without such a capability, there could have been no moon landings, no space stations—in short, no space program.

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
by Michael Dobbs
Published 3 Sep 2008

The second moment of high drama occurred on Black Saturday with a rapid succession of bizarre incidents, any one of which might have led to nuclear war. The real danger no longer arose from a clash of wills between Kennedy and Khrushchev but over whether the two of them jointly could gain control of the war machine that they themselves had unleashed. To adapt Ralph Waldo Emerson's remark, events were in the saddle and were riding mankind. The crisis had gained a momentum of its own. An American U-2 was shot down over Cuba by a Soviet air defense unit without Khrushchev's authorization within a few moments of another U-2 blundering over the Soviet Union without Kennedy knowing anything about it.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 4 Sep 2017

Henry David Thoreau invented a certain kind of entitled, upper-middle-class extended adolescence. After college he hung around the nice Boston suburb where he’d grown up, taught some school, wrote the occasional essay, networked, became personal assistant and protégé to a famous local writer (Ralph Waldo Emerson), decided eating meat was bad, and on a camping trip with a local rich kid accidentally burned down three hundred acres of forest. Then, at twenty-seven, in 1844, he hatched a high-concept plan for a project that epitomized the pastoral fantasy that American suburbanites and hippies and country-home owners have reenacted ever since.

The Power Elite
by C. Wright Mills and Alan Wolfe
Published 1 Jan 1956

This tone of resigned bitterness can come across to a contemporary reader as arrogant, as if Mills and Mills alone were the only one capable of seeing a truth impenetrable to everyone else. Good social criticism requires attachment as well as alienation. One must identify with and even admire something before it makes sense to expend one’s energies criticizing it. That sense of engagement with America once sparked writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman to hold their country up to a higher standard. All too often Mills does not share their generous sense of American life and writes instead as cantankerous critic, sour in his anger, rejectionist in his views of the world around him. For that reason, if for no other, Mills the social critic is not always as effective as Mills the social scientist.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 5 Jun 2016

Upon taking office, he announced that a new $600 million, thousand-room palace that he had commissioned as the new residence of Turkish prime ministers would instead become the new home of the president. Like Putin and many others before him, Erdoan could have secured an unblemished legacy as one of his nation’s greatest postwar leaders—if he had stepped down gracefully after two terms. Instead, he is mired in controversy. In the end, said Ralph Waldo Emerson, every hero becomes a bore. It is a bad sign for any country when its leader can’t give up the trappings of power and views himself as consubstantial with the nation. The Bolivian socialist Evo Morales presided over a reasonably strong economy for two terms, then recently succeeded in changing the constitution to allow himself to run for a third, which is not a good sign.

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America
by Bruce Cannon Gibney
Published 7 Mar 2017

In eighteenth-century Europe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau expanded the romantic liturgy, extolling the virtues of nature and sentiment and peddling under these hazy banners thoughts on the proper and organic ordering of person and society, and more permissive and compassionate approaches to childrearing, a bewigged Dr. Spock to the Gallic masses. The American version, championed by Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, offered similar visions. The spectacular compromises and failures of the counter-Enlightenment should have been warnings to the Boomers. For the sociopathic personality, however, Romanticism was too seductive to let details get in the way. Leave aside, then, that the Diggers achieved little, Rousseau the child expert had consigned his five children to orphanages (the better to pursue his ménage with Mme.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

Sensible conservatives are happier resting their conservativism on social conventions (which can be passed from one generation to another) than on the facts of biology (which are subject to a genetic lottery). Until the 1960s, mental measurement found its most passionate supporters on the left and its most serious critics on the right. Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the founders of the American transcendentalist movement, advocated the creation of an ‘anthropometer’ that could gauge everybody’s innate merit. ‘I should like to see that appraisal applied to every man, and every man made acquainted with the true number and weight of every adult citizen, and that he then be placed where he belongs, with so much power confided to him as he could carry and use.’59 J.

The Book of Not Knowing: Exploring the True Nature of Self, Mind, and Consciousness
by Peter Ralston
Published 30 Aug 2010

Unaccustomed as we are to not-knowing, we don’t understand the freedom that awaits us when we experience life beyond our beliefs. 12:33 To move in the direction of authentic being, we need to engage in an ongoing process of locating our every assumption and belief, observing the nature of our inventions, and unraveling these fictions one by one. The more we do this, the more likely we are to have a breakthrough where all at once the whole dynamic can be grasped and recognized for what it is. People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Inventing Personalized Worlds 12:34 Discovering our buried assumptions first requires the will to do so. Most of us have our hands full just dealing with our various needs and life activities, and testing the validity of our belief system is something we find hard to “get around to.”

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life
by Robert Wright
Published 1 Jan 1994

And once again, the paradox is resolved by viewing the press as a congealer of common interest, a tool by which people with shared goals reap positive sums through concerted action. As we’ll see in the next two chapters, the same paradox, and the same resolution, applies to later information technologies. Chapter Fourteen AND HERE WE ARE Web to weave, and corn to grind; Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind. —Ralph Waldo Emerson The philosopher Karl Popper felt that “the belief in historical destiny is sheer superstition.” Besides, he added, even if there were a destiny, it would be unknowable. “There can be no prediction of the course of human history by scientific or any other rational methods.” Popper’s basic argument was simple.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
by Adam Winkler
Published 27 Feb 2018

“The American people,” he said, “in giving it their imprimatur understood what they were doing, and meant to decree what has, in fact, been decreed.” In other words, it did not matter that no one talked about protecting corporations. All that mattered were the words that the sovereign people added to the text, which should be read expansively to protect everyone, including corporations, from discriminatory laws. Paraphrasing a Ralph Waldo Emerson poem well known at the time, Conkling shrugged off the people’s ignorance of their deed by suggesting they “may have builded better than they knew.” For additional support for what might have been seen as a scurrilous argument, Conkling also had his musty old journal. It had been compiled contemporaneously “by an experienced recorder” to capture the Joint Committee’s deliberations over the Fourteenth Amendment.

Fantasyland
by Kurt Andersen
Published 5 Sep 2017

Henry David Thoreau invented a certain kind of entitled, upper-middle-class extended adolescence. After college he hung around the nice Boston suburb where he’d grown up, taught some school, wrote the occasional essay, networked, became personal assistant and protégé to a famous local writer (Ralph Waldo Emerson), decided eating meat was bad, and on a camping trip with a local rich kid accidentally burned down three hundred acres of forest. Then, at twenty-seven, in 1844, he hatched a high-concept plan for a project that epitomized the pastoral fantasy that American suburbanites and hippies and country-home owners have reenacted ever since.

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
by Robert Wright
Published 28 Dec 2010

And once again, the paradox is resolved by viewing the press as a congealer of common interest, a tool by which people with shared goals reap positive sums through concerted action. As we’ll see in the next two chapters, the same paradox, and the same resolution, applies to later information technologies. Chapter Fourteen AND HERE WE ARE Web to weave, and corn to grind; Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind. —Ralph Waldo Emerson The philosopher Karl Popper felt that “the belief in historical destiny is sheer superstition.” Besides, he added, even if there were a destiny, it would be unknowable. “There can be no prediction of the course of human history by scientific or any other rational methods.” Popper’s basic argument was simple.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
by Thomas L. Friedman
Published 22 Nov 2016

“You start to reflect, you start to rethink your assumptions, you start to reimagine what is possible and, most importantly, you start to reconnect with your most deeply held beliefs. Once you’ve done that, you can begin to reimagine a better path.” But what matters most “is what you do in the pause,” he added. “Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best: ‘In each pause I hear the call.’” Nothing sums up better what I am trying to do with this book—to pause, to get off the merry-go-round on which I’ve been spinning for so many years as a twice-a-week columnist for The New York Times, and to reflect more deeply on what seems to me to be a fundamental turning point in history.

The Snow Queen
by Joan D. Vinge
Published 1 Feb 2001

Vinge All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America ".. . strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." --New Testament, Matthew 7:14 "You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both." --Ralph Waldo Emerson I would like to gratefully acknowledge the inspiration and artistry of Hans Christian Andersen, whose folk tale "The Snow Queen" gave me the seeds of this story; and Robert Graves, whose book The White Goddess provided me with the rich Earth in which it grew. And I would like to thank those people who helped me weed, and tend, and harvest the fruits of my labor: my husband Vernor, and my editors Don Bensen and Jim Frenkel, without whose perceptive and sensitive suggestions this book would not have grown as strong or as truly.

Heaven's Command (Pax Britannica)
by Jan Morris
Published 22 Dec 2010

Here is the oath of allegiance sworn by the parliamentarians of Tasmania, then called Van Diemen’s Land, when the first self-governing assembly met in Hobart: I do seriously promise and swear, That I will be faithful and bear true Allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, as lawful Sovereign of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and of this Colony of Van Dieman’s Land, dependent on and belonging to the said United Kingdom; and that I will defend Her to the utmost of my Power against all traitorous Conspiracies or Attempts whatever which shall be made against Her Person, Crown and Dignity; and that I will do my utmost Endeavour to disclose and make known to Her Majesty, Her Heirs and Successors, all Treasons and traitorous Conspiracies and Attempts which I shall know to be against Her or any of them; and all this I do swear without any Equivocation, mental Evasion,’ or secret Reservation, and renouncing all Pardons and Dispensations from any Person or Persons whatever to the contrary. SO HELP ME GOD! The new nations overseas would prove the most durable, and the most noble, of the imperial achievements, as the American Ralph Waldo Emerson realized: ‘I have noted the reserve of power in the English temperament. In the island, they never let out all the length of all the reins, there is no Berserkir rage, no abandonment or ecstasy of will or intellect…. But who would see the uncoiling of that tremendous spring, the explosion of their well-husbanded forces, must follow the swarms which, pouring now for two hundred years from the British islands, have sailed, and rode, and traded, and planted, through all climates … carrying the Saxon seed, with its instinct for liberty and law, for arts and for thought—acquiring under some skies a more electric energy than the native air allows—to the conquest of the globe’.

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
by Daniel Immerwahr
Published 19 Feb 2019

In 1904 Burnham enlisted in this holy war himself. He accepted an invitation to draw up plans for Manila and for a new “summer capital” the government sought to establish in the mountains at Baguio. The White City was going to the Philippines. * * * Burnham’s invitation came from Cameron Forbes, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grandson. Forbes had come to the Philippines as commissioner of commerce and police, a wide-ranging job giving him authority over building roads and quashing revolts. In 1909 he became the governor-general. “Who but a mad dreamer could have planned such a career for me?” he asked his diary on his fortieth birthday.

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall
by Mark W. Moffett
Published 31 Mar 2019

the Marquis de Sade wrote after the French Revolution, bringing to mind the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg.19 When the members’ rancor is directed at foreigners, their identification with their society heightens; their sense of common purpose and shared fate, of the people rising as one, is invigorated.20 In the Yankee North of the United States, it took the Civil War to forge that sort of oneness. “Before the war our patriotism was a firework, a salute, a serenade for holidays and summer evenings,” Ralph Waldo Emerson mused. “Now the deaths of thousands and the determination of millions of men and women show that it is real.”21 William Graham Sumner, the sociologist who coined the term “ethnocentrism,” wrote in a much-discussed passage a century ago: “The exigencies of war with outsiders are what make peace inside, lest internal discord should weaken the we-group for war.”22 To Sumner, external war and internal peace play out a horrid game of interdependence.

Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys: 50th Anniversary Edition
by Michael Collins and Charles A. Lindbergh
Published 15 Apr 2019

Gemini 10 flies no more; we are but awkward trespassers, bobbing at the mercy of a new set of experts. They are EVA now, thrashing around out there somewhere. “Hey, boys, take your time! We’re not in any hurry. We don’t want anybody getting hurt out there.” It is over. 9 When it is dark enough, men see the stars. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Being the seventeenth American to fly in space is a small distinction, and in a small way it changed my life. My name didn’t become a household word (“Let’s see, aren’t you Scott Cooper?”), nor did people keep my checks for the signature instead of cashing them, as they reportedly did John Glenn’s.

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong
Published 6 Apr 2020

This also meant that, overwhelmingly, what you wore, ate, and used to pass your hours was made within your local township, or dearly bought. For Thoreau, the fact that it took him a day to walk or ride into Boston was a benefit—part of living deliberately. But his was the point of view of a rich guy, or at least of a guy without a family to care for, and for whom Ralph Waldo Emerson’s second wife, Lidian Jackson, was willing to bake pies. The laboratory, the corporation, global transportation, global communications, and falling barriers—together, these factors were more than enough to trigger the decisive watershed and carry humanity out of Malthusian poverty. They also made the story of the world’s economies one story in a way that had never been true before.

The Crisis of Crowding: Quant Copycats, Ugly Models, and the New Crash Normal
by Ludwig B. Chincarini
Published 29 Jul 2012

Once again, the world’s liquidity providers had all disappeared, just when they were needed most. CHAPTER 8 The Quant Crisis It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. —Ralph Waldo Emerson The 2008 financial crisis was the most shocking financial crisis the United States had seen since Black Tuesday, when the Dow Jones dropped by 12% and began the Great Depression, which saw a 27% drop in real output and a rise in the unemployment rate from 2% to 25%. No one can be certain when the financial crisis of 2008 really began, but there were early signals in June 2007 (see Figure 8.1 for a timeline of the crisis).

The Simple Living Guide
by Janet Luhrs
Published 1 Apr 2014

They bring with them a box of tissues, and each partner talks about whatever is important to him or her. The other one agrees to listen without judging. This simple ritual keeps these people emotionally close and is a signal to them both that they are important enough for this special time. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON I like this idea from The Couple’s Comfort Book: “When you anticipate an upcoming busy time at work, fill a few postcards or greeting cards with words of love, stamp them, and keep them handy to mail to your lover at work when you feel the need to connect but don’t have time for it.” You can extend this simple ritual to sending cards to your children and friends as well.

Frommer's London 2009
by Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince
Published 25 Aug 2008

In England’s case, many have expressed their views of the country at different periods. An early-18th-century portrait is provided by K. P. Moritz in Journeys of a German in England in 1782 (Holt, Rinehart & Winston), about his travels from London to the Midlands. Nathaniel Hawthorne recorded his impressions in Our Old Home (1863), as did Ralph Waldo Emerson in English 25 Traits (1856). For an ironic portrait of mid-19th-century Victorian British morals, manners, and society, seek out Taine’s Notes on England (1872). Henry James’s comments on England at the turn of the 20th century in English Hours are worth a read. In A Passage to England (St.

Red Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 23 Oct 1992

So the whole collection of extrovert-introvert traits, with all that they said about one’s character, could be traced back to a group of cells in the brain stem called the ascending reticular activating system, the area that ultimately determined levels of cortical arousal. Thus they were driven by biology. There should be no such thing as fate: Ralph Waldo Emerson, a year after his six-year-old son died. But biology was fate. And there was more to Michel’s system; fate, after all, was no simple either/or. He had recently begun to consider Wenger’s index of autonomic balance, which used seven different variables to determine whether an individual was dominated by the sympathetic or the parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

Sierra Club founder John Muir (an ur-vagabonder if there ever was one) used to express amazement at the well-heeled travelers who would visit Yosemite only to rush away after a few hours of sightseeing. Muir called these folks the “time-poor”—people who were so obsessed with tending their material wealth and social standing that they couldn’t spare the time to truly experience the splendor of California’s Sierra wilderness. One of Muir’s Yosemite visitors in the summer of 1871 was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who gushed upon seeing the sequoias, “It’s a wonder that we can see these trees and not wonder more.” When Emerson scurried off a couple hours later, however, Muir speculated wryly about whether the famous transcendentalist had really seen the trees in the first place. Nearly a century later, naturalist Edwin Way Teale used Muir’s example to lament the frenetic pace of modern society.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
by Edward E. Baptist
Published 24 Oct 2016

National Republican politicians disavowed the raid, but even moderate opponents of slavery expansion adopted Brown as a symbol of uncompromising resistance against much-resented slavelords. The city of Albany, New York, fired one hundred salutes to John Brown on December 2, starting at the scheduled time of his execution. Northern middle-class public culture depicted him as Christlike. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that John Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” And Henry David Thoreau, last heard from as a pacifist proponent of nonviolence, and a non-taxpaying protestor against the Mexican War, said that “for manly directness and force, and for simple truth,” all the talk of politicians could not equal “the few casual remarks of crazy John Brown.”

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite
by Duff McDonald
Published 24 Apr 2017

In 2015, the School suffers not from a dearth of cases, but from an obscene surplus of them. Every graduate of the School has worked his or her way through some five hundred cases by the time they’re done. Some swear by the overwhelming experience. Others, to quote Bob Dylan, think it all adds up to “too much of nothing.” 6 The Idealist: Wallace Brett Donham If Ralph Waldo Emerson was correct in his supposition that an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man, then for HBS that man is not Edwin Gay, its founding dean, but his successor, Wallace Brett Donham. As dean of the School during its rise to greatness (1919–42), Donham provided the warp and weft underlying everything that the Harvard Business School has become.

The Railways: Nation, Network and People
by Simon Bradley
Published 23 Sep 2015

Surtees set aside his professional interest as a novelist to grumble that ‘a book to prevent people seeing the country [is] quite as essential as a bun to prevent their being hungry’ (Plain or Ringlets, 1860). Even an artist with Pre-Raphaelite affinities, whose works were championed by Ruskin for their close observation of nature, might succumb to the habit: Ford Madox Brown’s diary records a journey to Liverpool in 1856, spent entirely in reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English Traits, hot off the press. More broadly, rapid travel helped to make banal what had once been intensely felt. Speed itself, so thrilling when the railways were new, became routine, at least as far as the articulate and well-off class of traveller was concerned. As early as 1841, a London journalist referred wearily to ‘the dull, monotonous railway’.

She Has Her Mother's Laugh
by Carl Zimmer
Published 29 May 2018

On its website, charlemagne.org, the order declares that its objective is “to maintain and promote the traditions of chivalry and knighthood.” By the mid-1800s, the search for celebrity, nobility, and virtue had turned American genealogy into a full-blown industry. Guilds formed, publishing official journals of their research. Ralph Waldo Emerson found the new enterprise decidedly un-American. It was a turn to the past in a country that should have been looking toward the future. “When I talk to a genealogist,” Emerson wrote in his journal in 1855, “I seem to sit up with a corpse.” * * * — Some of the ships that sailed into Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s were delivering settlers from England, including my own ancestor Roger Goodspeed.

George Marshall: Defender of the Republic
by David L. Roll
Published 8 Jul 2019

Later Bevin rang up Georges Bidault and Vyacheslav Molotov, the foreign ministers of France and the Soviet Union. The three of them agreed to meet in Paris on June 27 to “discuss how Europeans might devise a European recovery plan, its requirements, and the parts they would play in it.”83 * * * * * * * * Borrowing the famous line from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn,” Senator Vandenberg called General Marshall’s Harvard speech “a shot heard round the world.”84 It was surely revolutionary, marking a sharp departure from America’s retreat into isolationism after the Great War. And it ran against the long-standing policy of Marshall’s army predecessor, General George Washington, who warned in 1796 that the fledgling republic should “steer clear” of “permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”

USA Travel Guide
by Lonely, Planet

You can revisit this momentous bit of history at Minute Man National Historic Park ( 978-369-6993; www.nps.gov/mima; 174 Liberty St, Concord; admission free; 9am-5pm) and along the 5.5-mile Battle Road Trail , which is open to cyclists as well as hikers. In the 19th century, Concord harbored a vibrant literary community. Next to the Old North Bridge is the Old Manse ( 978-369-3909; 269 Monument St; adult/child $8/5) , former home of author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Within a mile of the town center are the Ralph Waldo Emerson house ( 978-369-2236; 28 Cambridge Turnpike; adult/child $8/6) , Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House ( 978-369-4118; 399 Lexington Rd; adult/child $9/5) and the Wayside ( 978-369-6993; 455 Lexington Rd; adult/child $5/free) , where Alcott’s Little Women was set. Walden Pond , where Henry David Thoreau lived and wrote Walden, is 3 miles south of the town center; you can visit his cabin site and take an inspiring hike around the pond.

…

Not until the 1820s, however, did writers take up the two aspects of American life that had no counterpart in Europe: the untamed wilderness and the frontier experience. James Fenimore Cooper is credited with creating the first truly American literature with The Pioneers (1823). In Cooper’s ‘everyman’ humor and individualism, Americans first recognized themselves. In his essay Nature (1836), Ralph Waldo Emerson articulated similar ideas, but in more philosophical and spiritual terms. Emerson claimed that nature reflected God’s instructions for humankind as plainly as the Bible did, and that individuals could understand these through rational thought and self-reliance. Emerson’s writings became the core of the transcendentalist movement, which Henry David Thoreau championed in Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854).

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.
by William D. Cohan
Published 25 Dec 2015

"He's really a very extraordinary man. He has an enormous sense of integrity and honor, and great pride in the reputation of the firm." Rockefeller hired Andre often to advise him and his bank, Chase Manhattan, on potential deals. Andre in turn invited Rockefeller into his venture capital deals. Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed that "an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man." Emerson's insight is especially true in the case of Andre Meyer and Lazard. "He had kind of a crazy passion for Lazard," remembered Francois Voss, who was related to Andre by marriage and whom Andre invited to join the Paris firm in 1958.

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
by Ron Chernow
Published 1 Jan 1997

Drawings show a picturesque, medieval-looking building on a hill, festooned with turrets, towers, and crenellations and surrounded by a stone wall. The cultural atmosphere, with its impassioned support for women’s rights and black welfare, must have been highly congenial to the sisters. Among other speakers, they heard inspirational lectures given by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Phillips, Henry Ward Beecher, and John Brown. A devotee of the Protestant work ethic, Cettie even approved of the school’s daily regimen, which was minutely budgeted from wake-up at 5:30 A.M. until the lights went out at 9:45 P.M. “I do not call the rules strict but am pleased with all of them,” she informed her former music teacher.63 At Oread, she dropped an occasional friendly note to Rockefeller, though the relationship was at this point less one of romance than of close camaraderie.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914
by Richard J. Evans
Published 31 Aug 2016

Continuing her reading, unsystematic though it might have been, she came across the phenomenon of Utopian communities, described in a novel she published in 1848, where two characters return from a visit to the phalanstery at Lowell, Massachusetts, and try to set up an imitation of it in Sweden. The following year Bremer travelled to America and visited Lowell. She met Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), ‘a quiet nobly serious figure with a pale complexion, starkly marked features and dark hair’, conversed with leading politicians and literary figures, and was too busy being lionized to find time to read ‘the thick volumes of Hegelian philosophy’ she had brought with her in her continuing quest to educate herself.

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris
by Richard Kluger
Published 1 Jan 1996

Among the most ardent of the antitobacco reformers was the Reverend George Trask, whose Thoughts and Stories for American Lads of 1859 was subtitled “Uncle Toby’s Anti-Tobacco Advice to His Nephew Billy Bruce” and counseled that smoking did away with some 20,000 souls a year, a statistic unsupported by even remotely credible data. A more temperate view was expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, without pretense of scientific specificity, took note of the debate over whether smoking was medically harmful, but concluded only that “the habit once established gives rise to more or less craving for this form of indulgence.” He was not dwelling, though, on the lure of the cigarette, which was hardly more than a novelty item until the mid-1870s.

Eastern USA
by Lonely Planet

You can revisit this momentous bit of history at Minute Man National Historic Park ( 978-369-6993; www.nps.gov/mima; 174 Liberty St, Concord; admission free; 9am-5pm) and along the 5.5-mile Battle Road Trail, which is open to cyclists as well as hikers. In the 19th century, Concord harbored a vibrant literary community. Next to the Old North Bridge is the Old Manse ( 978-369-3909; 269 Monument St; adult/child $8/5), former home of author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Within a mile of the town center are the Ralph Waldo Emerson house ( 978-369-2236; 28 Cambridge Turnpike; adult/child $8/6), Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House ( 978-369-4118; 399 Lexington Rd; adult/child $9/5) and the Wayside ( 978-369-6993; 455 Lexington Rd; adult/child $5/free), where Alcott’s Little Women was set. Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau lived and wrote Walden, is 3 miles south of the town center; you can visit his cabin site and take an inspiring hike around the pond.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker
Published 24 Sep 2012

According to the British historian J. A. Cramb, peace would mean “a world sunk in bovine content . . . a nightmare which shall be realized only when the ice has crept to the heart of the sun, and the stars, left black and trackless, start from their orbits.”118 Even thinkers who opposed war, such as Kant, Adam Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, H. G. Wells, and William James, had nice things to say about it. The title of James’s 1906 essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” referred not to something that was as bad as war but to something that would be as good as it.119 He began, to be sure, by satirizing the military romantic’s view of war: Its “horrors” are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and zo-ophily, of “consumer’s leagues” and “associated charities,” of industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed.

Frommer's England 2011: With Wales
by Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince
Published 2 Jan 2010

In England’s case, many have expressed their views of the country over different periods. An early-18th-century portrait is provided by K. P. Moritz in Journeys of a German in England in 1782 (Holt, Rinehart & Winston), which covers his travels from London to the Midlands. Nathaniel Hawthorne recorded his impressions in Our Old Home (1863), as did Ralph Waldo Emerson in English Traits (1856). For an ironic portrait of mid-19th-century Victorian British morals, manners, and society, seek out Taine’s Notes on England (1872). Henry James’s comments on England at the turn of the 20th century in English Hours (1905) are worth a read. In A Passage to England (St.

Europe: A History
by Norman Davies
Published 1 Jan 1996

Norman Davies, Preface to God’s Playground: A History of Poland (Oxford, 1981), vol. i, p. vii. 22. Lord Acton, quoted by Geoffrey Parker, The Thirty Years’ War (New York, 1984), p. xv. 23. ‘It is part of my creed that the only Poetry is History, could we tell it right’; Thomas Carlyle, letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 Aug. 1834, in The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. J. Slater (New York, 1964), 105. 24. See Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘Telling It as You Like It: Post-modernist History and the Flight from Fact’, TLS, 16 Oct. 1992,12–15. 25. Ibid. 15. 26. Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV, quoted by Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh, 1957), 123. 27.

The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York
by Caro, Robert A
Published 14 Apr 1975

The great bridges, tunnels and piers created by authorities were tangible, highly visible monuments to their achievements. In short, Moses had discovered a governmental institution that was not only uniquely suited to his purposes but was, in institutional terms, an embodiment of his personality, an extension of himself. "An institution," said Ralph Waldo Emerson, "is the lengthened shadow of one man." The institution named "the public authority" was, in the form it took after Moses' eyes focused on it in 1937 and 1938, the lengthened shadow of Robert Moses. He himself seemed to understand this. His remarks and, sometimes, his published statements, reveal a striking identification of himself with authorities, which he defined as "nonpolitical" organizations headed by "unsalaried" trustees in which "the speed, flexibility and absence of red tape, traditionally associated with private industry," could be used for public purposes.