Quotes
Quotes - Emerson
Nor sequent centuries could hit
Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.
Born for success he seemed,
With grace to win, with heart to hold,
With shining gifts that took all eyes.
Nor mourn the unalterable Days
That Genius goes and Folly stays.
Fear not, then, thou child infirm;
There's no god dare wrong a worm.
He thought it happier to be dead,
To die for Beauty, than live for bread.
Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill?
Pay every debt, as if God wrote the bill!
Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.
Though love repine, and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply,--
"'T is man's perdition to be safe
When for the truth he ought to die."
For what avail the plough or sail,
Or land or life, if freedom fail?
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep and pass and turn again.
Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.
Seeing only what is fair,
Sipping only what is sweet,
Thou dost mock at fate and care.
Thou animated torrid-zone.
In the vaunted works of Art
The master-stroke is Nature's part.
If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all;
And where it cometh, all things are;
And it cometh everywhere.
Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.
The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
To be great is to be misunderstood.
Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.
The man in the street does not know a star in the sky.
