‘Futility of criticism’

“Sisyphus’’ (1548-49)by Titian, at the Prado Museum, Madrid.

“What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism. Our young people have thought and written much on labor and reform, and for all that they have written, neither the world nor themselves have got on a step. Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve.’’

— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Massachusetts-based essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist and poet who led the Transcendentalism movement of the mid-19th Century centered in the Boston area.

Emerson’s grave at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, in Concord, Mass.

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