"Nature does not cocker us: we are children, not pets: she is not fond: everything is dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe universal laws."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 124 of 211)
4.2K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"All things are flowing, even those that seem immovable. The adamant is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe the materialswhich they want from the air and the ground. They burn, that is, exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth again. The animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual consumption. The earth burns, the mountains burn and decompose, slower, but incessantly."
Read quote
3 likes
"Nature turns all malfaisance to good."
Read quote
3 likes
"Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam."
Read quote
3 likes
"We are imprisoned in life in the company of persons powerfully unlike us."
Read quote
3 likes
"Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are playing in the sky."
Read quote
3 likes
"Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever."
Read quote
3 likes
"If we tire of the saints, Shakspeare is our city of refuge."
Read quote
3 likes
"Could Shakespeare give a theory of Shakespeare?"
Read quote
3 likes
"Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare."
Read quote
3 likes
"Romeo, of dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more,than Juliet,--than Romeo."
Read quote
3 likes
"The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges."
Read quote
3 likes
"The scholar was not raised by the sacred thoughts amongst which he dwelt, but used them to selfish ends. He was a profane person,and became a showman, turning his gifts to marketable use, and not to his own sustenance and growth. It was found that the intellect could be independently developed, that is, in separation from the man, as any single organ can be invigorated, and the result was monstrous."
Read quote
3 likes
"When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief."
Read quote
3 likes
"A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe: that the masses of nature do undulate and flow."
Read quote
3 likes
"We hear eagerly every thought and word quoted from an intellectual man. But in his presence our own mind is roused to activity, and we forget very fast what he says."
Read quote
3 likes
"Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve."
Read quote
3 likes
"The whole constitution of property on its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons deteriorating and degrading."
Read quote
3 likes
"Personal rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the census: property demands a government framedon the ratio of owners and of owning."
Read quote
3 likes
"Whilst the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property are very unequal. Oneman owns his clothes, and another owns a country."
Read quote
3 likes