Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
-
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.
-
The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
-
Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.
-
Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?
-
None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.
-
The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates.
-
It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
-
Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
-
So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.
-
The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
-
Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.
-
Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
-
But these young scholars who invade our hills, Bold as the engineer who fells the wood, And travelling often in the cut he makes, Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.
-
God will not have his work made manifest by cowards
-
Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.
-
To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.
-
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.
-
Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.
-
Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
-
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.
-
Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.
-
Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.
-
If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as 'spiritual life,' 'God,' 'soul,' 'cross,' etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.
-
Pass in, pass in, the angels say, In to the upper doors; Nor count compartments of the floors, But mount to Paradise By the stairway of surprise.