Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
American philosopher, essayist, and poet.
We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul.
In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, — seven or eight ancestors at least, — and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.
But all sorts of things and weather
Must be taken in together
To make up a year,
And a sphere.
The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself.
Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.
Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
A good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands.
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.
I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a 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.
Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design; — and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man ... and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.
You can never do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but though his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one.
He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.
I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.
Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.
A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.
As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.