Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes - Page 126

• The virtue in most request is conformity.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Self Reliance, Aversion, Conformity

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1808). “Select Essays and Poems”, p.32

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• It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him [H.D. Thoreau]. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Country, Journey, Hiking

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2004). “Thoreau”, p.21, The Minerva Group, Inc.

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• For the world was built in order around the atoms march in tune; Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder, The sun obeys them, and the moon.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Moon, Order, Tunes

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1854). “Poems”, p.69

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• Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Country, Book, Reading

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2472, Delphi Classics

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• The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Eye, Rose, Mind

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.656, Library of America

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• Only that mind draws me which I cannot read.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Mind, Draws

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1960). “The Journals”

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• A man's style is his mind's voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Voice, Style

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1992). “The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.375, University of Missouri Press

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• The squirrel hoards nuts and the bee gathers honey, without knowing what they do, and they are thus provided for without selfishness or disgrace.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Work, Squirrels, Nuts

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2000). “Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson: (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.109, Modern Library

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• This knot of nature is so well tied that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Nature, Science, Two

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2008). “The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.89, Penguin

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• Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Ordinary, Doe, Murder

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.243, Harvard University Press

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• Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Power, Civilization, Black

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.362

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• The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Thinking, Virtue

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.82, Courier Corporation

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• They have seen but half the universe who never have been shown the house of pain.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Pain, Adversity, House

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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.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Summer, Rain, Reality

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.203, Penguin

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• All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the end it shall ripen into truth, and you shall know why you believe.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Believe, Roots, Vegetables

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.419, Library of America

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• The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Self, Knives

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2821, Delphi Classics

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• 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.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Giving, Brave, Joy

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1979). “Emerson's Literary Criticism”, p.229, U of Nebraska Press

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• And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Party, Two, Romance

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.328, Library of America

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• Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Believe, Men, Order

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1849). “Nature”, p.2

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• What strength belongs to every plant and animal in nature. The tree or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is, with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same impression and effect at all times. All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle's, and of a rabbit, rabbit's. But a man is broken and dissipated by the giddiness of his will; he does not throw himself into his judgments; his genius leads him one way but 't is likely his trade or politics in quite another.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Animal, Duplicity

  "Natural History of Intellect and Other Papers". Book by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1893.

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• 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.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Children, Eye, Writing

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.256, Library of America

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• A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy and strangulation.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Jewels, Evil, Mind

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1893). “Natural history of intellect and other papers”

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• The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Necks, Monsters

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.175

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• It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Faults, Facts, States

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Self-Reliance, the Over-Soul, and Other Essays”, p.17, Coyote Canyon Press

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• The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Wise, Stars, Flower

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2016). “Nature and the Method of Nature”, p.3, Library of Alexandria

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