Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes - Page 103

• The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beauty, Men, Long

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.471

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• Without the great arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beauty, Art, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1870). “Culture, Behavior, Beauty: Books, Art Eloquence. Power, Wealth, Illusions”

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• Beauty through my senses stole;
  I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beauty, Perfect, Whole

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1808). “Select Essays and Poems”, p.98

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• That you are fair or wise is vain,
  Or strong, or rich, or generous;
  You must have also the untaught strain
  That sheds beauty on the rose.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Success, Beauty, Wise

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Lee Grossman (2005). “A Year with Emerson: A Daybook”, p.193, David R. Godine Publisher

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• Personal beauty is then first charming and itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions, and not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beauty, Sunset, Vision

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2000). “Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson: (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.242, Modern Library

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• Go out of the house to see the moon, and 't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who could ever clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone: 't is only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beauty, Knowledge, Moon

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.38, Penguin

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• Thy dangerous glances
  make women of men;
  new-born, we are melting
  into nature again.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beauty, Men, Melting

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.118, Delphi Classics

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• For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beauty, Beautiful, God

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.202, Harvard University Press

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• We call the beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good and the heartlessness of the true.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beauty, Beautiful, Mean

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.290

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• It is true that genius takes its rise out of the mountains of rectitude; that all beauty and power which men covet are somehow born out of that Alpine district; that any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beauty, Men, Rose

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.430

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• The virtue of art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from theconnection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Lying, Thoughtful

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2009). “The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.276, Modern Library

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• By going one step further back in thought, discordant opinions are reconciled by being seen to be two extremes of one principle, and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still higher vision.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Thoughtful, Thinking, Agreement

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (189?). “The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”

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• Generalization is always a new influx of divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill that attends it.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Thinking, Thoughtful, Mind

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.179, Penguin

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• Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Thoughtful, Thinking, Craze

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.207, Penguin

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• Thought dissolves the material universe by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Thinking, Thoughtful, Mind

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1982). “Emerson: Selected Essays”, p.311, Penguin

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• And what avails it that science has come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities, but the incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Knowledge, Thinking, Thoughtful

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2011). “Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.481, Penguin

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• What is addressed to us for contemplation does not threaten us, but makes us intellectual beings.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Thinking, Thoughtful, Intellectual

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1964). “The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.58, Harvard University Press

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• Our thinking is a pious reception.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Thoughtful, Thinking, Reception

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2004). “A Dream Too Wild: Emerson Meditations for Every Day of the Year”, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations

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• How much more the seeker of abstract truth, who needs periods of isolation, and rapt concentration, and almost a going out of thebody to think!

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Truth, Thoughtful, Thinking

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2009). “The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.637, Modern Library

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• An English family consists of a few persons, who, from youth to age, are found revolving within a few feet of each other, as if tied by some invisible ligature, tense as that cartilage which we have seen attaching the two Siamese.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Family, Two, Feet

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.48

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• For, when men shall meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a shower of stars, clothed with thoughts, with deeds, with accomplishments, it should be the festival of nature which all things announce. Of such friendship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other things are symbols of love. Those relations to the best men, which, at one time, we reckoned the romances of youth, become, in the progress of character, the most solid enjoyment.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Friendship, Stars, Sex

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1851). “Essays, lectures and orations”, p.216

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• I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist, after much exchange ofgood offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Friendship, Men, Two

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1460, Delphi Classics

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• A new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons which have given me delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Friendship, Sleep, Yield

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1338, Delphi Classics

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• Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Friendship, League, No Friends

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Self-Reliance, the Over-Soul, and Other Essays”, p.51, Coyote Canyon Press

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• I think I have done well, if I have acquired a new word from a good author; and my business with him is to find my own, though itwere only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Book, Reading, Thinking

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.172, Graphic Arts Books

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