Ralph Waldo Emerson: Goodness

Ralph Waldo Emerson was American philosopher, essayist, and poet. Explore interesting quotes on goodness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1454 quotes88 likes

“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
Variant: Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none.
Source: Culture, Behavior, Beauty, Books, Art, Eloquence, Power, Wealth, Illusions
Context: Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company.

“Speak your latent conviction… Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source: Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but though his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good. 'Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Letters and Social Aims, Quotation and Originality
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

February 1855
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

“Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“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

“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)

“Good bye, proud world! I'm going home;
Thou art not my friend; I am not thine.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good Bye
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: Good bye, proud world! I'm going home;
Thou art not my friend; I am not thine.

“Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,
Plans, credit, and the muse;
Nothing refuse.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Give All to Love http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/give_all_to_love.htm, st. 1 <br class="br">1840s, Poems (1847)

“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

“Nothing can be preserved that is not good.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In Praise of Books (1860)

“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

“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.