Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour.
In England every man you meet is some man's son in America, he may be some man's father.
It is implied in all superior culture that a complete man would need no auxiliaries to his personal presence
But in a hundred high schools and colleges, this warfare against common-sense still goes on. Four, or six, or ten years, the pupil is parsing ...
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world.
Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.
The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation, an...
All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is taste. Others have the same love in such success that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art.
Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.
Sweet is death forevermore. Nor haughty hope, nor swart chagrin, Nor murdering hate, can enter in. All is now secure and fast.
The spirit only can teach. Not any profane man, not any sensual, not any liar, not any slave can teach, but only he can give, who has; he only...
An eminent teacher of girls said, "the idea of a girl's education, is, whatever qualifies them for going to Europe."
Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.
It the proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.
The best bribe which London offers today to the imagination, is, that, in such a vast variety of people and conditions, one can believe there is room for persons of romantic character to exist . . .
Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.
Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.
If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. Life
By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.
Live, let live, and help live
Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.
The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his pea...
Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.
