Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson -
The Conduct of Life (1860)
147 Sourced Quotes
View all Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source
Report...
The formulas of science are like the papers in your pocketbook, of no value to any but their owner.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Be lord of a day, through wisdom and justice, and you can put up your history books.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
We resent all criticism which denies us anything that lies in our line of advance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the current of events, and strong with their strength.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source
Report...
The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source
Report...
Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source
Report...
Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source
Report...
In the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a property in a work of art, which belonged to all who could behold it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1
2
3
4
5
6
Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Creative Commons
Born:
May 25, 1803
Died:
April 27, 1882
(aged 78)
More about Ralph Waldo Emerson...
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes