Parenting & Family Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson isn’t merely “appreciating nature” here; he’s staging a quiet revolt against the cultivated adult posture that treats the natural world as scenery, resource, or moral lesson. “No hostility” is a telling phrase: it implies that hostility is the default state in modern life, a reflex born of control, productivity, and the suspicion that what isn’t managed is wasted. Emerson rejects that posture with a deliberately disarming alternative: a child’s love. Not innocence as ignorance, but innocence as a way of seeing before cynicism hardens into habit.

The sentence turns on scale and surrender. “I expand and live” suggests a self that is not fortified but porous, growing by exposure rather than by conquest. Then he lands the punch with “like corn and melons” - comic in its plainness, almost anti-poetic. That’s the point. Emerson, the philosopher, refuses the grand metaphor (mountains, stars) and chooses produce. Growth is not heroic; it’s ordinary. Nature doesn’t applaud you for flourishing. It just provides conditions.

Context matters: this is Transcendentalism at its most practical, an American answer to industrializing modernity and inherited European pieties. Emerson argues that the sacred isn’t locked in churches or books; it’s available through direct contact, a warm day doing more work on the soul than any sermon. The subtext is democratic and a little defiant: if spiritual renewal is as common as sunlight, then authority - religious, social, even intellectual - loses its monopoly. The self can be remade not by discipline alone, but by participation.