Ralph Waldo Emerson - Representative Men

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We hear eagerly every thought and word quoted from an intellectual man. But in his presence our own mind is roused to activity, and we forget very fast what he says.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Astronomy is excellent; but it must come up into life to have its full value, and not remain there in globes and spaces.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions. Society does not love its unmaskers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man's fortunes are the fruit of his character. A man's friends are his magnetisms.

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 genius is a genius by the first look he casts on any object. Is his eye creative? Does he not rest in angles and colors, but beholds the design,--he will presently undervalue the actual object.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown him. He snaps his fingers at laws; and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.

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
In every company, there is not only the active and passive sex, but, in both men and women, a deeper and more important sex of mind, namely, the inventive or creative class of both men and women, and the uninventive or accepting class.

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
He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies and hatreds of his competitors.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which, in replacing the broken bone, contents itself with releasing the parts from false position; they fly into place by the action of the muscles. On this art of nature all our arts rely.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be low, as that we should be low; for we musthave a society.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The intelligent have a right over the ignorant; namely, the right of instructing them.

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