Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
American philosopher, essayist, and poet.
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.
The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as “spiritual life,” “God,” “soul,” “cross,” etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.
Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.
We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.
Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Tho' her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive,
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.
The soul is subject to dollars.
Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.
Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word Politic, which now for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?
A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good.
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.
Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances...Strong men believe in cause and effect.
I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.