Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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Circles, like the soul, are neverending and turn round and round without a stop
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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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Seeing only what is fair, Sipping only what is sweet, Thou dost mock at fate and care.
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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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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!
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The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
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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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I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.
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Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
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I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
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Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows how to play with them as a young child plays with graybeards and in churches.
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Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
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The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
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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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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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Every burned book enlightens the world.
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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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It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
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The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
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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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Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.
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Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.
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Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.
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Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.