第389页

From Self-Reliance:
1. Our first thought is rendered back to us the trumpets of the Last Judgement.
2. In every work of genius we recognize our rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
3. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.
4. 别嫌长, 很精彩的.
Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested, — "But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, 'They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil's child, I will live then from the devil.' No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it. 
5. 关于该不该施舍, 怒赞那一句"Are they my poor?"
Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee thou foolish philanthropist that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at the college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousandfold Relief Societies; though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by-and-by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
6. But the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
同意, 但不是每一个在人群中享受甘之如饴的孤独的人都是伟大的人.
7. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
与孔子所说"言必信, 行必果, 硁硁然小人哉."有异曲同工之妙.
8. To be great is to be misunderstood.
名句. The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost的前言引用过.
9. 以下也是我很喜欢的一段
These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts: in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike.


From Nature:
1. But to a sound judgement, the most abstract truth is the most practical.
2. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.
illuminate:to provide or brighten with light
3. Even the corpse has its own beauty.
眼前一亮.
4. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
5. Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.
pomp: vain or ostentatious display
想起Shakespeare's Sonnet 29的最后两行: 
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
6. To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.
这也正是我所说的, 一个人如果喜欢一个地方, 就应在一年四季都来到那里.　
7. Beauty comes unsought.
精辟.


From American Scholar:
1. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. 
在图书馆里成长起来的温顺的年轻人相信，接受西塞罗、洛克、培根所发表的观点是自己的责任；他们却忘了西塞罗、洛克和培根写这些书的时候，也只不过是图书馆里的年轻人。
2. I had better never seen a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
我宁愿从来没见过一本书，而不愿意被它的引力扭曲过来，把我完全拉到我的轨道外面，使我成为一颗卫星，而不是一个宇宙。
3. Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.
functionary: one who holds an office or a trust or performs a particular function; an official
4. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has desceneded into the secrets of all minds.
5. Free should the scholar be...free even to the definition of freedom...
会心一笑, 想起曾用的昵称: "无定义的自由"
6. The drop is a small ocean.


以上三篇均为爱默生最为著名的散文, 下面一篇纯为我个人爱好. 从何时起, 我在关注一个男性作家的生平时总要了解他与女性的关系如何, 这对理解其作品中的女性形象有很一定帮助. 通过我的观察, 爱默生有着颇正常的女性观, 这也与其早年痛失爱妻及与母亲关系融洽有关吧.
From Woman:
1. They are poets who believe their own poetry.
"They"指女性
2. They have tears, and gaieties and faintings, and glooms, and devotion to trifles.
3. I need not repeat to you,--your solitude will suggest it,--that a masculine woman is not strong, but a lady is.
这话受用.

语言风格上我发现的较显著的一点, 是爱默生对分号的偏好, 之前从没见过别人一连用上如此多分号的. 随性之故吧.
[补充: Other characteristics of Emersonian style: his tendency to reiterate a point with plentiful and varied illutration; memorable gem-like sentences, oft paradoxical in nature. (From Toming's A History of American Literature)]
早前我听到爱默生的名字也提不起兴趣, 那天遇到小杨, 听她说正经作家里挺喜欢爱默生. 我方去读的. 读后果然也还算喜欢.