Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.
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The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear.
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We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
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Power and speed be hands and feet.
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A great man is always willing to be little.
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Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
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The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
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The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
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I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.
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Reality is a sliding door.
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Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
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My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.
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One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly.
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The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.
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There is always safety in valor.
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People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.
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You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
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Revolutions go not backward.
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God enters by a private door into every individual.
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We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy.
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To be great is to be misunderstood.
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Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; If I cannot carry forests on my back, Neither can you crack a nut.
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By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
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Life is too short to waste The critic bite or cynic bark, Quarrel, or reprimand; 'Twill soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark!