Compensation - Emerson's essay

• Compensation - Emerson's essay - (http://www.emersoncentral.com/compensation.htm) - Leitura finalizada em 13 de Setembro de 2014.
• Notas minhas:
• leitura recomendada pelo Napoleon Hill (in The Law of Success)
• Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess.
• For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something.
• Nature hates monopolies and exceptions.
• Things refuse to be mismanaged long (Res nolunt diu male administrari).
•  Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature.
• What we call retribution is the universal necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears.
• Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed. 
• The soul says, Have dominion over all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have the power over things to its own ends.
• Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of nature, — the sweet, without the other side, — the bitter.
• Fear is an instructer of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions. One thing he teaches, that there is rottenness where he appears.
• But because of the dual constitution of things, in labor as in life there can be no cheating. The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself.
• The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the power: but they who do not the thing have not the power.
• Our strength grows out of our weakness.
• A great man is always willing to be little. 
• In general, every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
• The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect, and enmity, defend us, if we will, from selfishness and fraud.
• The soul is not a compensation, but a life.
• Essence, or God, is not a relation, or a part, but the whole.
• The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism. 
• There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of being.
• There can be no excess to love; none to knowledge; none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism.
• I no longer wish to meet a good I do not earn, for example, to find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it brings with it new burdens. I do not wish more external goods, — neither possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The gain is apparent; the tax is certain.
• I learn the wisdom of St. Bernard, — "Nothing can work me damage except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault."