Ralph Waldo Emerson: Trending quotes (page 28)

“The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1860s, Life and Letters in New England (1867)

Men , Motivation

“Go put your creed into your deed,
Nor speak with double tongue.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ode, Concord, July 4, 1857
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home? I have been quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. …. He that does not fill a place at home, cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a larger crowd. You do not think you will find anything there which you have not seen at home? The stuff of all countries is just the same. Do you suppose there is any country where they do not scald milk-pans, and swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish? What is true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book The Conduct of Life

The Conduct of Life, Chapter 4, “Culture,” p. 145

Men , Justice , Beauty , Travel

“Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wood-notes
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Home

“It is time to be old,
To take in sail: -
The god of bounds,
Who sets to seas a shore,
Came to me in his fatal rounds,
And said: 'No more!”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Terminus http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=l&p=c&a=p&ID=20600&c=323
1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

God , Time , Sea

“The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empires but is not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

4 March 1831
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

God , Truth , Disease , Religion

“Coal is a portable climate.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wealth
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)

“Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book The Conduct of Life

The Conduct of Life, Behaviour
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Support

“There is properly no history; only biography.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

History

“My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

God , Age , Sex

“Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Nature

Source: 1830s, Nature http://www.emersoncentral.com/nature.htm (1836), Ch. 1, Nature

God , Universe , Parting

“We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source: 1830s, Nature http://www.emersoncentral.com/nature.htm (1836), Ch. 8, Prospects

Grass

“The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Goethe; or, the Writer,” p. 272
1850s, Representative Men (1850)

“If a man own land, the land owns him.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wealth
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)

“It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Uses of Great Men,”
1850s, Representative Men (1850)

Men , Beauty , Soul , Painting

“The music that can deepest reach,
And cure all ill, is cordial speech.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Merlin's Song II
1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

Music

“The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Civilization

Country

“Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Considerations by the Way
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)

Art

“When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

10 December 1824
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

Heart

“I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1 October 1848
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

Books , Age , Exercises , Intelligence