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Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1454 quotes88 likes

“In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, — seven or eight ancestors at least, — and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fate
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)

“There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, — now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860), Behavior

“The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“It may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance

“The soul is subject to dollars.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“Deep in the man sits fast his fate
To mould his fortunes, mean or great.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fate http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=l&p=c&a=p&ID=20569&c=323 <br class="br">1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

“For there's no rood has not a star above it;
The cordial quality of pear or plum
Ascends as gladly in a single tree,
As in broad orchards resonant with bees;
And every atom poises for itself,
And for the whole.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Musketaquid http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/musketaquid.htm, st. 5 <br class="br">1840s, Poems (1847)

“I like a church, I like a cowl,
I love a prophet of the soul,
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles;
Yet not for all his faith can see,
Would I that cowled churchman be.
Why should the vest on him allure,
Which I could not on me endure?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

St. 1 <br class="br">1840s, Poems (1847), The Problem http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/problem.htm

“We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson Music

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), The Poet

“All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Power
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)

“Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see — not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

11 April 1834
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

“Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Culture
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)

“The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“The cup of life is not so shallow
That we have drained the best
That all the wine at once we swallow
And lees make all the rest.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1827 journal entry reproduced in Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), p. 82

“I am afraid the remark is too honest, and comes from the same origin as the maxim of the tyrant, "If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused." I notice too, that the ground on which eminent public servants urge the claims of popular education is fear: "This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats."”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), New England Reformers

“All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the end it shall ripen into truth, and you shall know why you believe.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Intellect
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841)

“Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Each and All
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.

“The days …. come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Works and Days http://www.rwe.org/comm/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=37&Itemid=148 <br class="br">1870s, Society and Solitude (1870)

“I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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