The Conduct of Life
1860
Emerson poses the question that every generation must answer: how shall I live? Written in 1860 as a collection of nine essays drawn from lectures delivered across America's rapidly transforming landscape, The Conduct of Life grapples with the tension between fate and freedom that defines human existence. Emerson rejects the notion of absolute determinism yet acknowledges that our circumstances shape us profoundly. He insists we possess an inner capacity to shape our own destiny, drawing on what he terms "the crescive self" - that ever-expanding potential within each person. The work speaks to anyone seeking to understand their place in a world that often seems to operate beyond individual control, offering not easy answers but a rigorous framework for thinking about living deliberately. Its influence echoes through generations of American thought, from Whitman's radical individualism to Nietzsche's philosophical investigations.
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“There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.””
— Unknown
“I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.””
— Unknown
“Cleansed by the elemental light and wind, steeped in the sea of beautiful forms which the field offers us, we may chance to cast a right glance back upon biography.””
— Unknown
“These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to forsee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.”
— Unknown
“Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.”
— Unknown
“The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar, is, the mind of the Past,”
— Unknown
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