Ralph Waldo Emerson - The Conduct of Life (1860)

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Religious literature has eminent examples, and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have tapped.

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

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

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

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
The formulas of science are like the papers in your pocketbook, of no value to any but their owner.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
For sickness is a cannibal which eats up all the life and youth it can lay hold of, and absorbs its own sons and daughters.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be lord of a day, through wisdom and justice, and you can put up your history books.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man has a right perception of any truth, who has not been reacted on by it, so as to be ready to be its martyr.

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

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
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
In childhood we fancied ourselves walled in by the horizon, as by a glass bell, and doubted not by distant travel we should reach the baths of the descending sun and stars. On experiment the horizon flies before us and leaves us on an endless common, sheltered by mo glass bell.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of Nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson