Ralph Waldo Emerson - The Conduct of Life (1860)

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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
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
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 imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock plumes, and embroidery; and I remember one rainy morning in the city of Palermo, the street was ablaze with scarlet umbrellas.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid hallucinations, and especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with, and all are tripped up first or last. But the mighty mother, who had been so sly with us, as if she felt she owed us some indemnity, insinuates into the Pandora box of marriage some deep and serious benefits, and some great joys.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; the key to all ages is - Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Science is a search after identity, and the scientific whim is lurking in all corners.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The bulk of mankind believe in two gods. They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion; but in mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come under another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The longer we live the more we must endure the elementary existence of men and women; and every brave heart must treat society asa child, and never allow it to dictate.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The moral equalizes all; enriches, empowers all. It is the coin which buys all, and which all find in their pocket. Under the whipof the driver, the slave shall feel his equality with saints and heroes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The affirmative class monopolize the homage of mankind. They originate and execute all the great feats. What a force was coiled upin the skull of Napoleon!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Come out of the azure. Love the day. Do not leave the sky out of your landscape.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The remedy for all blunders, the cure of blindness, the cure of crime, is love.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The physician prescribes hesitatingly out of his few resources... If the patient mends, he is glad and surprised.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being? There are men, who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations withthem, and lead the activity of the human race. And if there be such a tie, that, wherever the mind of man goes, nature will accompany him, perhaps there are men whose magnetisms are of that force to draw material and elemental powers, and, where they appear, immense instrumentalities organize around them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda-these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There was never anything that did not proceed from a thought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Enlarge not thy destiny, said the oracle: endeavor not to do more than is given thee in charge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The religion which is to guide and fulfill the present and coming ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The scientific mind must have a faith which is science.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
And the glory of character is in affronting the horrors of depravity to draw thence new nobilities of power: as Art lives and thrills in new use and combining of contrasts, and mining into the dark evermore for blacker pits of night.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We resent all criticism which denies us anything that lies in our line of advance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson