|
|
|
|
| |
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (25 May 1803 - 27 April 1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet.
Sourced
- When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.
- Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
- I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.
- The American Scholar (1837)
- The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.
- Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
- He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
- Address on The Method of Nature (1841) (see also: Love)
- I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,— that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.
- Essays First Series: Self-Reliance (1841)
- A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
- Essays First Series: Self-Reliance (1841)
- There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.
- Essays First Series: Self-Reliance (1841)
- A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
- Essays First Series: Self-Reliance (1841)
- Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
- Essays First Series: Self-Reliance (1841)
- Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.
- Essays First Series: Prudence (1841)
- The difference between men is in their principle of association. Some men classify objects by color and size and other accidents of appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and effect. The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance. Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.
- Essays First Series: History (1841)
- When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions. Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God have, from time to time, walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.
- Essays First Series: History (1841)
- Broader and deeper we must write our annals, from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience, if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.
- Essays First Series: History (1841)
- Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.
- Journals (May 1849) This is a remark Emerson wrote referring to the unreliability of second hand testimony and worse upon the subject of immortality. It is often taken out of proper context, and has even begun appearing on the internet as "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know" or sometimes just "I hate quotations." (More quotations on: Quotations)
- I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "LEAVES OF GRASS." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.
I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.
I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging…
- 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.
- Brahma (1857) Composed in July 1856 this poem is derived from a major passage of the Bhagavad Gita one of the most popular of Hindu scriptures, and portions of it were likely a paraphrase of an existing translation.
- Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
- 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.
- "The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons."
- The Conduct of Life: Worship (1860)
- The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
- The Conduct of Life: Fate (1860)
- Hitch your wagon to a star.
- "American Civilization", The Atlantic Monthly (1862)
- As soon as there is life there is danger.
- Society and Solitude (1870)
- A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life; he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.
- Society and Solitude: Works and Days (1870)
- Every artist was first an amateur.
- Letters and Social Aims: Progress of Culture (1876) (see also: Art)
- In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
- Letters and Social Aims: Quotation and Originality (1876) (see also: Books)
- Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.
- Letters and Social Aims: The Comic (1876)
- By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
- Letters and Social Aims (1876)
- Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.
- Letters and Social Aims (1876) :Quotation and Originality (see also: Quotations)
- Quotation confesses inferiority.
- Letters and Social Aims (1876)
- The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.
- Natural History of Intellect (1893)
Attributed
- A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
- All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.
- Can anyone remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?
- Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds
- Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
- Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live, as well as to think.
- Children are all foreigners.
- Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.
- Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
- Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
- Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
- Every hero becomes a bore at last.
- Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.
- Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.
- Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
- Give all to love; obey thy heart.
- I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called history is.
- I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.
- I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the Stern Fact, the Sad Self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
- If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.
- If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.
- In different hours a man represents each of several ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin—seven or eight ancestors, at least; and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music that life is.
- Insist on yourself; never imitate... Every great man is unique.
- It is an amiable illusion, which the shape of our planet prompts, that every man is at the top of the world.
- It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, "Always do what you are afraid to do."
- Let not a man guard his dignity, but let his dignity guard him.
- Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.
- Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.
- Nothing can be preserved that is not good.
- Source: In Praise of Books
- Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
- Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
- Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
- People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.
- Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
- Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.
- Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon-balls and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.
- The ancestor of every action is a thought.
- The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
- The force of character is cumulative.
- The only gift is a portion of thyself.
- The only reward of virtue is virtue.
- The only way to have a friend is to be one.
- The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it. (see also: Friendship)
- The voyage of the best ship is a zizzag line of a hundred tacks.
- The world belongs to the energetic.
- There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.
- There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge, and fox, and squirrel.
- Tis the good reader that makes the good book.
- Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies. (see also: Truth & Lies )
- We do what we must, and call it by the best names.
- What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
- What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
- When you strike at a king, you must kill him.
- Whoever is open, loyal, true; of humane and affable demeanour; honourable himself, and in his judgement of others; faithful to his word as to law, and faithful alike to God and man....such a man is a true gentleman.
- Wit makes its own welcome and levels all distinctions.
- Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance. (see also: Chance)
- Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have done singly will justify you now.
- To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
- When it is darkest, men see the stars.
- Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.
- Whatever limits us, we call Fate.
- Imagination is not the talent of some men, but is the health of every man.
- Every man I meet is in some way my superior.
External Links:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
