"How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or mother's life?"
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Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 188 of 211)
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"Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random, that we can seldom hear the acknowledgments of any person who would thank us for a benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit, which is directly received."
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"The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers' hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness."
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"New York is a sucked orange. All conversation is at an end, when we have discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities, domestic or imported, which make up our American existence."
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"Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles."
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"These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a god- like ease and power."
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"The public values the invention more than the inventor does. The inventor knows there is much more and better where this came from."
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"Religious literature has eminent examples, and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have tapped."
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"A man should not go where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society with him,Mnot bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but atmospherically. He should preserve in a new company the same attitude of mind and reality of relation, which his daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest club."
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"There is no event greater in life than the appearance of new persons about our hearth, except it be the progress of the characterwhich draws them."
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"We must leave our pets at home, when we go into the street, and meet men on broad grounds of good meaning and good sense."
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"Teaching is the perpetual end and office of all things. Teaching, instruction is the main design that shines through the sky and earth."
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"The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea."
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"The good judge is not he who does hair-splitting justice to every allegation, but who, aiming at substantial justice, rules something intelligible of the guidance of suitors."
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"The world is filled with the proverbs and acts and winkings of a base prudence, which is a devotion to matter, as if we possessedno other faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear; a prudence which adores the Rule of Three, which never subscribes, which never gives, which seldom lends, and asks but one question of any project,--Will it bake bread?"
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"The secret of success in education is respecting the students."
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"If you take in a lie, you must take in all that belongs to it."
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"If you want a friend you need to be a friend."
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"In imitation is a bit suicide."
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"Always maintain your common sense and artful skills, and funnel it all into plain enough dealings."
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