Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
American philosopher, essayist, and poet.
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.
The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.
We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.
The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.
We are always getting ready to live, but never living.
It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
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.
Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home:
Thou art not my friend, and I’m not thine.
Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good.
Never read any book that is not a year old.
He is great who is what he is from Nature, and who never reminds us of others.
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
Every man is a new method.
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
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!
As soon as there is life there is danger.
You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.