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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Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?
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Never read any book that is not a year old.
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The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us.
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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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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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The first wealth is health.
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A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good.
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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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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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In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?
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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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There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.
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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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Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.
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The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
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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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Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
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In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
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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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Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.
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Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.
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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.