Ralph Waldo Emerson - The Conduct of Life (1860)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson