Quotes
Quotes - Emerson
The word unto the prophet spoken Was writ on tablets yet unbroken: The word by seers or sibyls told, In groves of oak or fanes of gold, Still floats upon the morning wind, Still whispers to the willing mind.
Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought.
In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made difference? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.
From the feet, Hercules. [Lat., Ex pede Herculem.]
Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow.
Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.
The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.
Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists--talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.
When I have attempted to join myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual trick,--no more. They eat your service like apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel you, and delight in you all the time.
A person's life is limited but serving the people is limitless. I want to devote my limited life to serving the people limitlessly.
Had I but written as many odes in praise of Muhammad and Ali as I have composed for King Mahmud, they would have showered a hundred blessings on me.
The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.
The passages of Shakespeare that we most prize were never quoted until within this century. - Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.
What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?
The true ship is the ship builder.
When rats leave a sinking ship, where exactly do they think they're going?
The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else.
If you had taken off the shoe then, at length you would feel in what part it pinched you. [Lat., Si calceum induisses, tum demum sentires qua parte te urgeret.]
Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.
Sincerity is the highest compliment you can pay.
Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young And always keep us so.
Skepticism is slow suicide.
I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute a state. I think we must get rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom.
