Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
American philosopher, essayist, and poet.
We are always getting ready to live, but never living.
Life is too short to waste
The critic bite or cynic bark,
Quarrel, or reprimand;
'Twill soon be dark;
Up! mind thine own aim, and
God speed the mark!
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Every man is a new method.
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
He is great who is what he is from Nature, and who never reminds us of others.
Never read any book that is not a year old.
Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good.
Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home:
Thou art not my friend, and I’m not thine.
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.
It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
Deep in the man sits fast his fate
To mould his fortunes, mean or great.
The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men.
Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated.
I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.
Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances...Strong men believe in cause and effect.
To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same.
I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, — mettle and bottom.
Characters and talents are complemental and suppletory. The world stands by balanced antagonisms. The more the peculiarities are pressed the better the result. The air would rot without lightning; and without the violence of direction that men have, without bigots, without men of fixed idea, no excitement, no efficiency.
The novelist should not make any character act absurdly, but only absurdly as seen by others. For it is so in life. Nonsense will not keep its unreason if you come into the humorist's point of view, but unhappily we find it is fast becoming sense, and we must flee again into the distance if we would laugh.