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“Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

History
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Essays, First Series

“Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)

“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Friendship
Variant: A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud…

“Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word Politic, which now for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Politics

“Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Art

“Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Parnassus, Preface (1874)

“There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), History

“I should as soon think of swimming across 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.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Books
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Fear not, then, thou child infirm;
There's no god dare wrong a worm.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Compensation
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: Fear not, then, thou child infirm;
There's no god dare wrong a worm.

“Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young
And always keep us so.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ode to Beauty
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young
And always keep us so.

“What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; — show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; — and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)

“For what are they all in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good Bye
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: For what are they all in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?

“Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)

“The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)

“Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Introduction <br class="br">1830s, Nature http://www.emersoncentral.com/nature.htm (1836)

“Love not the flower they pluck and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Blight
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Divinity College Address (1838)

“A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy and strangulation.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Natural History of Intellect (1893)

“A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Power and Laws of Thought (c. 1870)

“The heroic cannot be the common, nor can the common be the heroic.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Quotation and Originality