Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
-
For the prevision is allied Unto the thing so signified; Or say, the foresight that awaits Is the same Genius that creates.
-
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.
-
Power and speed be hands and feet.
-
As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.
-
Reality is a sliding door.
-
People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.
-
The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear.
-
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
-
You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
-
Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves.
-
We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
-
I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.
-
There is always safety in valor.
-
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
-
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.
-
Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; If I cannot carry forests on my back, Neither can you crack a nut.
-
Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
-
Fear not, then, thou child infirm, There's no god dare wrong a worm.
-
To be great is to be misunderstood.
-
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!
-
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.
-
Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.
-
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.
-
Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life?