"The glance is natural magic. The mysterious communication established across a house between two entire strangers, moves all the springs of wonder."
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Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 202 of 211)
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"I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals."
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"Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science, and such is the mechanical determination of our age, and so recent are our best contrivances, that use has not dulled our joy and pride in them. 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 godlike ease and power."
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"The case wouldn't be overweight if you didn't have so many shoes. How many do you really need? This pair, for example, I swear you never even wore them."
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"That which we are, we are all the while teaching, not voluntarily, but involuntarily."
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"Pain is superficial, and therefore fear is. The torments of martyrdoms are probably most keenly felt by the by-standers."
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"The richest of all lords is Use, And ruddy Health the loftiest Muse. Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, Drink the wild air's salubrity."
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"We sell the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent pleasure."
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"Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to a deed."
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"Strange is this alien despotism of Sleep which takes two persons lying in each other's arms & separates them leagues, continents,asunder."
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"I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not to hold out his plate, as if I knew already."
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"But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age isworth a fit of insanity, is it not?"
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"From Washington, proverbially "the city of distances," through all its cities, states, and territories, it is a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations."
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"The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics andtrade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water."
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"Great country, diminutive minds. America is formless, has no terrible and no beautiful condensation."
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"In this our talking America, we are ruined by our good nature and listening on all sides. This compliance takes away the power ofbeing greatly useful."
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"American mind a wilderness of opportunities."
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"We ought to be cautious in taking even the best ascertained opinions and practices of the primitive Church for our own. If it could be satisfactorily shown that they esteemed it authorized and transmitted forever, that does not settle the question for us. We know how inveterately they were attached to their Jewish prejudices, and how often even the influence of Christ failed to enlarge their views. On every other subject succeeding times have learned to form a judgement more in accordance with the spirit of Christianity than was the practice of the early ages."
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"Freedom is the essence of this faith. It has for its object simply to make men good and wise. Its institutions then should be as flexible as the wants of men. That form out of which the life and suitableness have departed should be as worthless in its eyes as the dead leaves that are falling around us."
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"To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be madeby the reception of beautiful sentiments."
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