"Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men."
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Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 208 of 211)
4.2K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"No man can be criticised but by a greater than he. Do not, then, read the reviews."
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"The idea of God ends in a paltry Methodist meeting-house."
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"How beautiful to have the church always open, so that every tired wayfaring man may come in and be soothed by all that art can suggest of a better world when he is weary with this."
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"It is curious that Christianity, which is idealism, is sturdily defended by the brokers, and steadily attacked by the idealists."
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"By the irresistible maturing of the general mind, the Christian traditions have lost their hold."
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"Nature is a rag merchant, who works up every shred and ort and end into new creations."
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"The art of conversation, or the qualification for a good companion, is a certain self-control, which now holds the subject, now lets it go, with a respect for the emergencies of the moment."
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"The men who come on the stage at one period are all found to be related to each other. Certain ideas are in the air."
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"We find in life exactly what we put into it"
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"Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen library-a company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age."
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"The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. . . . They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; - cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame."
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"As soon as a child has left the room his strewn toys become affecting."
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"THE POET A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray: They overleapt the horizon's edge, Searched with Apollo's privilege; Through man, and woman, and sea, and star, Saw the dance of nature forward far; Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so."
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"Let there be worse cotton and better men."
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"There is one mind common to all individual men"
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"Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises."
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"The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society."
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"We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected."
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"Only so much of life do I know as I have lived."
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