Emerson: The Snore of the Muses :)

Here is another example of 会心一笑: :)

And he also said, reading a whole 500-page book all you get is a few golden sentences. :)))

When I read the North American Review, or the London Quarterly, I seem to hear the snore of the muses, not their waking voice. I was in a house where tea comes like a loaded wagon very late at night. Read & think. Study now, & now garden. Go alone, then go abroad. Speculate awhile, then work in the world. Yours affectionately.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, June 13-15, 1838


We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over & actually read a volume of 4 or 500 pages. Even the great books. 'Come', say theym 'we will give you the key to the world'— Each poet each philosopher says this, & we expect to go like a thunderbolt to the centre, but the thunder is a superficial phenomenon, makes a skin-deep cut, and so does the Sage— whether Confucius, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates; striking at right angles to the globe his force is instantly diffused laterally & enters not. The wedge turns out to be a rocket. I have found this to be the case with every book I have read & yet I take up a new writer with a sort of pulse beat of expectation.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, June 1841

A highly endowed man with good intellect & good conscience is a Man-woman & does not so much need the complement of Woman to his being, as another. Hence his relations to the sex are somewhat dislocated & unsatisfactory. He asks in Woman, sometimes the Woman, sometimes the Man.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, June 14, 1842

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— Henry David Thoreau, Journal, June 15, 1852
On leaving the house about eight o'clock at night, met the tall, pretty working girl. I followed her as far as the Rue de Grenelle, always meditating what course to pursue and almost miserable because I had the chance. I am always like that. I found afterwards, all sorts of ways to use in accosting her, and when it was the right time for them, I opposed them with the most absurd difficulties. My resolutions always evaporate when there is need of action... I have not enough simple, commonplace energy to overcome the thing by busying myself some other way. As long as inspiration is lacking, I am bored. There are some people who, in order to avoid boredom, know how to set themselves a task and accomplish it.