Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Quotes

• Pure by impure is not seen.

• Our life is not so much threatened,
  As our perception.

• Courtesy:
  Wishes not to be loved, but to be lovely;
  Not to be benefitted, but to be a benevolence.

• A scholar is the favorite of Heaven and of earth;
  The excellence of one's country,
  The happiest of mankind.

• There is a melody born of melody,
  That melts the world into a sea.

• And did you think that such a guest
  Would in thy hall take up his rest?
  --High gifts ask diviner guess:
  Not to be conned to tediousness.

• Not nail a great star to its track, . . .
  Tell when to go and when come back;. . .
  But open up thy heart to know
  What rainbows teach and sunsets show.

• Nature: I give to thee for thy defence
  Thy formidable innocence.

• The very thought of the Diety,
  Is as bright, effulgent daybeams.

• Here once the embattled farmers stood,
  And fired the shot heard round the world.

• In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

• Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

• Now everyone must do after his kind, be he asp or angle.

• . . .but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil.

• The highest price you can pay for a thing is to ask for it.

• We love characters in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous.

• To think is to act.

• All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

• We all boil at different degrees.

• Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.