Society and Solitude — Vocabulary
Ralph Waldo Emerson
the essay
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It by no means follows that we are not fit for society, because soirees are tedious and because the soiree finds us tedious.†

2 We must infer that the ends of thought were peremptory, if they were to be secured at such ruinous cost.†

We have a fine right, to be sure, to taunt men of the world with superficial and treacherous courtesies!†

A higher civility will reestablish in our customs a certain reverence which we have lost.†

As Bacon said of manners, " To obtain them, it only needs not to despise them," so we say of animal spirits that they are the spontaneous product of health and of a social habit.†

Society and solitude are deceptive names.†

Society cannot do without cultivated men.†

Though the stuff of tragedy and of romances is in a moral union of two superior persons whose confidence in each other for long years, out of sight and in sight, and against all appearances, is at last justified by victorious proof of probity to gods and men, causing joyful emotions, tears and glory, — though there be for heroes this moral union, yet they too are as far off as ever from an intellectual union, and the moral union is for comparatively low and external purposes, like the cooperation of a ship's company or of a fire-club.†

'T is fine for uS to talk; we sit and muse and are serene and complete; but the moment we meet with any-body, each becomes a fraction.'†

But this banishment to the rocks and echoes no metaphysics can make right or tolerable.†

Such are the talents determined on some specialty, which a culminating civilization fosters in the heart of great cities and in royal chambers.†

I know that my friend can talk eloquently; you know that he cannot articulate a sentence: we have seen him in different company.†

His dismay at his visibility had blunted the fears of mortality.†

A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty, as of a displaced and unfurnished member.†

But this genial heat is latent in all constitutions, and is disengaged only by the friction of society.†

It would be more true to say they separate as oil from water, as children from old people, without love or hatred in the matter, each seeking his like; and any interference with the affinities would produce constraint and suffocation.†

The recluse witnesses what others perform by their aid, with a kind of fear.†

Here again, as so often, nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line.†

Even Swedenborg, whose theory of the universe is based on affection, and who reprobates to weariness the danger and vice of pure intellect, is constrained to make an extraordinary exception: " There are also angels who do not live consociated, but separate, house and house; these dwell in the midst of heaven, because they are the best of angels."†

2 We must infer that the ends of thought were peremptory, if they were to be secured at such ruinous cost.†