Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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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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They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt; And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
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Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities.
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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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People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.
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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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Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?
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Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.
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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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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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I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.
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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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I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
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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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Every burned book enlightens the world.
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Self-trust is the first secret of success.
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Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
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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 method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
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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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It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
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Blessed are those who have no talent!
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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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Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.