*This poem is an assemblage and reconstruction of various fragments of text from “Self-Reliance” (Essay) written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841. (See photo credit below)
Dependent Upon (Self-Reliance) Emerson
All philosophy is at fault
Plastic and permeable principles
Perception is not whimsical, it is fatal
Our reading is medicant and sycophantic
What is called life and what is called death
We know not how in the soul, is not diverse is explained
Life has no memory, is only for itself
What petty oracles
Wicked dollar alms: sots
Life not only avails, not the having lived
Cannot spend the day in explanation
A great man is coming to eat at my house
To be great is to be misunderstood
Rich men poets are not
Greatness appeals to the future
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind
We lie in the lap of immense intelligence
Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions
My giant goes with me wherever I go
I must be myself
Do not seek outside yourself
Trust thyself
Do that which is assigned to you and you cannot hope too much or dare too much
Besides, all persons have their moments of reason
We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death and afraid of each other
We are parlour soldiers
By now we are a mob
Society is a wave
History resolves itself
The great genius returns to essential man
As if everything were titular and ephemeral but he
That man is the word made flesh
He who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude
Grief too will make us idealists
Foolish face of praise
The intellect is vagabond and out system of education fosters restlessness and indebtedness
So that the walls of the system blend to their eye
It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery
The magnetism which all original action exerts
The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree
From things, from space, from light, from time
The sum total of both is the same
Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes but the soul is light.
In the remote horizon with the walls of the universe
Advancing on chaos and dark
A Greenwich nautical almanac he has
No other data for computing our orbit
Requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design
All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being
Insignificant to the curve of the sphere
The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation
Scatters your force, loses your time, blurs the impression
All philosophy is at fault
Do not believe it
A man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head
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