Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
-
Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.
-
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.
-
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.
-
The first wealth is health.
-
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.
-
Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.
-
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
-
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.
-
Self-trust is the first secret of success.
-
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.
-
There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.
-
Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one.
-
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.
-
The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it.
-
All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself.
-
If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again.
-
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.
-
The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.
-
The music that can deepest reach, And cure all ill, is cordial speech.
-
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.
-
Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.
-
There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.
-
Blessed are those who have no talent!
-
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.