Quotes
Quotes - Emerson
He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself.
The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.
I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across the Charles river when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.
Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough for literature. - Ralph Waldo Emerson,
If we encountered a man or rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read. - Ralph Waldo Emerson,
The more reason, the less government.
Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.
What is a man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what has been made, a denouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good?
Dear to us are those who love us. . . but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit . . .
No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.
We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears apples.
Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.
No book was ever written down by any but itself.
Let no one honour me with tears, or bury me with lamentation. Why? Because I fly hither and thither, living in the mouths of me. [Lat., Nemo me lacrymis decoret, nec funera fletu. Faxit cur? Volito vivu' per ora virum.]
Men are respectable only as they respect.
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
I consider theology to be the rhetoric of morals.
We must set up a strong present tense against all rumors of wrath, past and to come.
Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.
Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.
Sanity is very rare: every man almost, and every woman, has a dash of madness.
Out from the heart of nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old.
