"Our globe discovers its bidden virtues, not only in heroes and arch-angels, but in gossips and nurses."
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Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 97 of 211)
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"Let not the author eat up the man, so that he shall be all balcony and no house."
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"Very idle is all curiosity concerning other people's estimate of us, and all fear of remaining unknown is not less so."
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"An artist spends himself like the crayon in his hand, till he is all gone."
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"We must have kings, we must have nobles; nature is always providing such in every society; only let us have the real instead of the titular. In every society some are born to rule, and some to advise. The chief is the chief all the world over, only not his cap and plume. It is only this dislike of the pretender which makes men sometimes unjust to the true and finished man."
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"We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid hallucinations, and especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with, and all are tripped up first or last. But the mighty mother, who had been so sly with us, as if she felt she owed us some indemnity, insinuates into the Pandora box of marriage some deep and serious benefits, and some great joys."
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"Nature ever faithful is To such as trust her faithfulness."
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"Universities are of course hostile to geniuses."
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"Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol."
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"Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous."
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"The genius of life is friendly to the noble, and, in the dark, brings them friends from far."
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"He that despiseth small things will perish by little and little."
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"Such is the active power of good temperament! Great sweetness of temper neutralizes such vast amounts of acid."
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"We imperatively require a perception of and a homage to beauty in our companions. Other virtues are in request in the field and workyard, but a certain degree of taste is not to be spared in those we sit with."
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"We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man, man."
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"The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every society, and men unconsciously seek for it in each other."
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"Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population."
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"Heaven often protects valuable souls charged with great secrets, great ideas, by long shutting them up with their own thoughts."
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"Self-love is, in almost all men, such an over-weight that they are incredulous of a man's habitual preference of the general good to his own; but when they see it proved by sacrifices of ease, wealth, rank, and of life itself, there is no limit to their admiration."
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"We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors."
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