Professor C. Jack Orr's Web Site

This page is devoted to Ralph Waldo Emerson, my life's most inspiriting sage. This is not an exceptional statement. It is proclaimed by generations of Americans. Emerson, however, did not wish for us to become Emersonians. He always throws us back on ourselves.  He invites and provokes each of us to create an "original relation to the universe." Emerson believed the energy to create that relationship is divine, given with our birth and available to each who would become    "a newborn bard" of the spirit.

From Emerson

"My belief is that each soul represents a certain fact in nature...whose demonstrator or orator he is and should be that justice may be done to that particular fact among men."

As quoted in Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Infinitude of the Private Man, p. 206.

"What we commonly call man, the eating drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love."

"I have only one doctrine, the infinitude of the private man."

"Let him [the orator] remember that the true orator must not wrap himself in himself, but must wholly abandon himself to the sentiment he utters and to the multitude he addresses...Let him for a moment forget himself, and then, assuredly, he will not be forgotten." [The esteemed 20th century psychologist, David McClelland, refers to this self-abandonment as the highest psychological maturity with reference to the experience of power].

"A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide."

"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;…The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried."

"Nothing is secure but life, transition, and the energizing spirit. "

Emerson's Concord Home

  Walden Pond