Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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United States! the ages plead, - Present and Past in under-song, - Go put your creed into your deed, Nor speak with double tongue.
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The cup of life is not so shallow That we have drained the best That all the wine at once we swallow And lees make all the rest.
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His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.
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Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.
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I think no virtue goes with size; The reason of all cowardice Is, that men are overgrown, And, to be valiant, must come down To the titmouse dimension.
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I like a church, I like a cowl, I love a prophet of the soul, And on my heart monastic aisles Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles; Yet not for all his faith can see, Would I that cowled churchman be. Why should the vest on him allure, Which I could not on me endure?
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Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.
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All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself.
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Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?
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When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies, 'Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life.'
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The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it.
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Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.
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The music that can deepest reach, And cure all ill, is cordial speech.
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The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.
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I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.
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History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, - see how it could and must be.
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I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.
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Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.
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Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one.
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Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
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There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.
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There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.
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Those who are esteemed umpires of taste are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual.
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I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.