Ralph Waldo Emerson - The Conduct of Life (1860)

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Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Very few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior quadruped organization. We call these millions men; but they are not yet men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all the music that can be brought to disengage him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our botany is all names, not powers: poets and romancers talk of herbs of grace and healing, but what does the botanist know of the virtues of his weeds?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The frost which kills the harvest of a year saves the harvest of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So muchfate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enter into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is the prisoner of his power. A topical memory makes him an almanac; a talent for debate, disputant; skill to get money makes him a miser, that is, a beggar. Culture reduces these inflammations by invoking the aid of other powers against the dominant talent, and by appealing to the rank of powers. It watches success.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As every man is hunted by his own daemon, vexed by his own disease, this checks all his activity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line,
Severing rightly his from thine,
Which is human, which divine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A person seldom falls sick but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the man than blueberries.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us learn to live coarsely, dress plainly, and lie hard. The least habit of dominion over the palate has certain good effects not easily estimated.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The dogma of the mystic offices of Christ being dropped, and he standing on his genius as a moral teacher, 'tis impossible to maintain the old emphasis of his personality; and it recedes, as all persons must, before the sublimity of the moral laws.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In spite of Virtue and the Muse,
Nemesis will have her dues,
And all our struggles and our toils
Tighter wind the giant coils.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The aid we can give each other is only incidental, lateral, and sympathetic.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
'Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only money of God is God. He never pays with any thing less, or any thing else.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The victories of character are instant, and victories for all.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fate is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought, for causes which are unpenetrated.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.

Ralph Waldo Emerson