Circling Emerson

Brian Leither posted some interesting Emerson quotes today. Not to be outdone, I decided to link to one of my favorite essays by one of my favorite authors, Emerson's "Circles". After reading it, you'll understand why many, including Nietzsche, have been inspired by this essay. Here is how it begins:

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced, in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace; that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.