Ralph Waldo Emerson - Representative Men

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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
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
Our impatience of miles, when we are in a hurry; but it is still best that a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; a science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences - I call it Dialectic - which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true.

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
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
Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence; without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal Cause.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our condition as men is risky and ticklish enough. One can not be sure of himself and his fortune an hour, but he may be whisked off into some pitiable or ridiculous plight.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man who would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances. The basis of political economy is noninterference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue and they will do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands. In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile to the industrious, brave and persevering.

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
It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class.

Ralph Waldo Emerson