journal 8

Journal 8 - Emerson’s Aphorisms

Write a one paragraph personal response based on three of the following aphorisms. Your responses should address the point Emerson is making as well as your thoughts/feelings about what he is saying.

1. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

2. Keep cool: it will all be one a hundred years hence.

3. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

4. We boil at different degrees.

5. To be great is to be misunderstood.

6. There are always two parties; the establishment and the movement.

7. When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

8. In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.

9. What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered.

10. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines.

11. What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.

12. All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair.

13. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

14. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

15. The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.

‘We boil at different degrees’ means that all of us have different strengths and weaknesses. All of us have a different temper. We also all have different 'boiling points', or times when we get angry or agitated. I like this one also because its very true, in that everyone is different and can handle different things.

Number thirteen means that the more we try new things, the wiser we will have. Everytime we fail or succeed teaches us a new lesson. We can only succeed when we try. Without putting effort forward, we can't get an award in return.

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us." This one is my favorite. What happened in the past- any regrets or wrong doing- shouldn't matter anymore. If it's the past, it should be over with, and not a worry. Compared to the things that we have in our hearts and soul, mind and imagination, that little worries are nothing. The compassion we have within is what really matters.