"[on Thoreau:] For not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to truth itself."
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Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 134 of 211)
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"We are impressed and even daunted by the immense Universe to be explored. "What we know is a point to what we do not know.""
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"The horseman serves the horse, The neat-herd serves the neat, The merchant serves the purse, The eater serves his meat; 'Tis the day of the chattel, Web to weave, and corn to grind, Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind."
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"The value of a dollar is to buy just things; a dollar goes on increasing in value with all the genius and all the virtue of the world. A dollar in a university is worth more than a dollar in a jail; in a temperate, schooled, law-abiding community than in some sink of crime, where dice, knives, and arsenic are in constant play."
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"Money often costs too much, and power and pleasure are not cheap."
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"Among the map makers of each generation are the risk takers, those who see the opportunities, seize the moment and expand man's vision of the future"
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"The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues."
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"Astrology is astronomy brought down to Earth and applied toward the affairs of men."
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"You must let go of a thing for a new one to come to you."
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"Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this."
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"An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. He is strong, not to do, but to live; not in his arms, but in his heart; not as an agent, but as a fact."
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"Thus grows up fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain."
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"Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you, or quietly drops you."
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"Friendship buys friendship."
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"Why needs a man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses, and places of amusement? Only for want of thought."
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"Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony."
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"There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said."
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"Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music, but clearest and most permanent, in words."
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"Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel, was never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility."
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"Youth is everywhere in place."
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