Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
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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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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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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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Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one.
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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.
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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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The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
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The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
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Never read any book that is not a year old.
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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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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.
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Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.
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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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Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.
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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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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 first wealth is health.
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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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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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Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.
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And striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form.
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The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.
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A good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands.