Ralph Waldo Emerson - Representative Men

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In his [the writer's] eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The men who come on the stage at one period are all found to be related to each other. Certain ideas are in the air.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Freedom is the essence of this faith. It has for its object simply to make men good and wise. Its institutions then should be as flexible as the wants of men. That form out of which the life and suitableness have departed should be as worthless in its eyes as the dead leaves that are falling around us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The "times," "the age" what is that, but a few profound persons and a few active persons who epitomize the times?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is young: the former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We hearken to the man of science, because we anticipate the sequence in natural phenomena which he uncovers.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is girt all round with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky.... These road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must extend the area of life and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a property in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere, where it plays a part as indestructible as any other.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed,--because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But also the constituency determines the vote of the representative. He is not only representative, but participant. Like can onlybe known by like. The reason why he knows about them is, that he is of them; he has just come out of nature, or from being a part of the thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Something is wanting to science until it has been humanized.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The terrible tabulation of the French statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, then, in every twenty thousand, or thirty thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or marries his grandmother.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The senses interfere everywhere, and mix their own structure with all they report of.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mankind have such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his life of thought and prayer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace; he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still real, and the explication must be not less magnificent.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept or if you have slept or if you have head ache or sciatica or leprosy or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace and not pollute the morning.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist. Every thing must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition, to understand any thing rightly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.

Ralph Waldo Emerson