Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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A mollusk is a cheap edition of man with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.
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Always do what you are afraid to do.
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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?
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The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.
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The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
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Every burned book enlightens the world.
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Seeing only what is fair, Sipping only what is sweet, Thou dost mock at fate and care.
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Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.
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The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
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Circles, like the soul, are neverending and turn round and round without a stop
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It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
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I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.
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Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
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Do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
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In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation.
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The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
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Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
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People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
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Heartily know, When half-gods go, The gods arrive.
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Never read any book that is not a year old.
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The soul is subject to dollars.
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So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.
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Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
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The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates.