"If we could have any security against moods! If the profoundest prophet could be holden to his words, and the hearer who is ready to sell all and join the crusade could have any certificate that to-morrow his prophet shall not unsay his testimony! But the Truth sits veiled there on the Bench, and never interposes an adamantine syllable; and the most sincere and revolutionary doctrine, put as if the ark of God were carried forward some furlongs, and planted there for the succor of the world, shall in a few weeks be coldly set aside by the same speaker, as morbid; "I thought I was right, but I was not," — and the same immeasurable credulity demanded for new audacities. If we were not of all opinions! if we did not in any moment shift the platform on which we stand, and look and speak from another! if there could be any regulation, any "one-hour-rule," that a man should never leave his point of view without sound of trumpet. I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Essays_(Emerson)
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Essays (Emerson)
146 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Essays (Emerson) →
Related Quotes
"And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Per…"
"Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right."
"It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, — "Always do what you are afraid to do.""
"All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowled…"
"There is no great and no small To the Soul that maketh all; And where it cometh, all things are; And it cometh everyw…"
": (Epigraph)"
"Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind and when the same thought occurs in another man, it is the key…"
"These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use in broad day. The student is to read history activel…"
"Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts."
"The ancestor of every action is a thought."