"Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair."
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Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 104 of 211)
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"Of all wit's uses, the main one is to live well with who has none."
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"There are many faculties in man, each of which takes its turn of activity, and that faculty which is paramount in any period and exerts itself through the strongest nation, determines the civility of that age: and each age thinks its own the perfection of reason."
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"The unsaid part is the best of every discourse."
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"A weed is a plant whose virtue is not yet known."
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"If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach."
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"A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad."
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"The philosophy of waiting is sustained by all the oracles of the universe."
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"I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven."
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"He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread"
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"The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions."
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"Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy."
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"The pleasure of eloquence is in greatest part owing often to the stimulus of the occasion which produces it- - to the magic of sympathy, which exalts the feeling of each by radiating on him the feeling of all."
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"In eloquence, the great triumphs of the art are when the orator is lifted above himself; when consciously he makes himself the mere tongue of the occasion and the hour, and says what cannot but be said. Hence the term "abandonment" to describe the self- surrender of the orator. Not his will, but the principle on which he is horsed, the great connection and crisis of events, thunder in the ear of the crowd."
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"[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate."
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"A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men."
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"History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by language and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived."
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"Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man."
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"Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet."
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"Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands."
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