Experience (Emerson)

"Experience" is an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was published in the collection Essays: Second Series in 1844. The essay is preceded by a poem of the same title.

In one passage, Emerson speaks out against the effort to over-intellectualize life - and particularly against experiments to create utopias, or ideal communities. A wise and happy life, Emerson believes, requires a different attitude. The mention of "Education Farm" is a reference to Brook Farm, a short-lived utopian community founded by former Unitarian minister George Ripley and his wife Sophia Ripley.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Speeches
  • The American Scholar (1837)
  • Divinity School Address (1838)
Poetry
  • "Concord Hymn" (1836)
  • "Uriel" (1846)
  • "The Rhodora" (1847)
  • "Brahma" (1856)
Essays
  • Nature (1836)
  • Self-Reliance (1841)
  • Compensation (1841)
  • Over-soul (1841)
  • Circles (1841)
  • The Poet (1844)
  • Experience (1844)
  • Politics (1844)
  • New England Reformers (1844)
Essay collections
  • Essays: First Series (1841)
  • Essays: Second Series (1844)
  • Representative Men (1850)
  • The Conduct of Life (1860)
Related articles
  • The Atlantic
  • Letter to Martin Van Buren
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson House
  • The Old Manse
  • Transcendentalism
  • Transcendental Club
People
  • Amos Bronson Alcott
  • Thomas Carlyle
  • Edward Waldo Emerson
  • Mary Moody Emerson
  • Rev. William Emerson
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  • James Russell Lowell
  • Henry David Thoreau


Famous quotes containing the word experience:

    “The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
    —Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)