app/notes/20170530-0109.md
Emerson on Intellect
emerson-intellect
1496106541
Before [Pycon](https://us.pycon.org/2017/), I visited [Powell's City of Books](http://www.powells.com/locations/powells-city-of-books/)
and stumbled into the fiction aisle of D through H authors. I sampled
some good books by Dostoyevsky, Dumas, and Hemingway but a particular passage
stuck in my memory:
> Every human being has a choice between truth and repose. Take which you
> please, you cannot have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates.
> He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the
> first philosophy, the first political party he meets-- most likely his
> father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door on
> truth. He in whom a love of truth predominates will keep himself aloof from
> all moorings and afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism and recognize all the
> opposite negations between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to
> the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion but he is a candidate for
> truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law of being.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essays: First Series
Essay XI Intellect