Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes - page 53

It is very hard to be simple enough to be good. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
The basis of good manners is self-reliance. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We never touch but at points. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being Whence, then, this worship of the past. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Washington, where an insignificant individual may trespass on a nation's time. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly back to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind the second is the power of nature. Nature is manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought the one, the many. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood.... View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Imitation is suicide. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and not for life. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All the great ages have been ages of belief. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The constructive intellect genius produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend's house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The life of man is a self-evolving circle. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is a search after power. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson