Ralph Waldo Emerson: Man

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

“But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Nature

Source: Nature

“Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Quotation and Originality
Source: Prose and Poetry

“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 key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can!”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Voluntaries
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Source: Emerson: Poems

“A man in debt is so far a slave.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Divinity College Address (1838)

“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)

“Do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Nature

Nature, Addresses and Lectures. The American Scholar <br class="br">1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837) <br class="br">Variant: If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. 6.

“Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Walter Savage Landor http://www.emersoncentral.com/walter_savage_landor.htm, from The Dial, XII (1841)

“Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused; when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind and when the same thought occurs in another man, it is the key to that era.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“And every man, in love or pride,
Of his fate is ever wide.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: “The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.”

“The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poetry and Imagination <br class="br">1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Books, Letters and Social Aims http://www.rwe.org/comm/index.php?option=com_content&amp;task=category&amp;sectionid=5&amp;id=74&amp;Itemid=149 (1876)

“The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Divinity College Address (1838) : full title “An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday Evening, July 15, 1838”, given at Harvard Divinity School : as contained in The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Writings, Emerson, ed. David M Robinson, Beacon Press (2004), p. 78 : ISBN 0807077194

“We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Walter Savage Landor, from The Dial, XII

“And striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

May-Day
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“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