All Quotes

"The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat, — men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority — demanding, not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice — comes graceful and beloved as a bride!"

"Self-command is the main elegance."

"The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure."

"Revolutions never go backwards."

"The activity of to-day and the assurance of to-morrow."

"We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter we stand by the old — reformers in the morning, conservatives at night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism is negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth."

"Natural religion supplies still all the facts which are disguised under the dogma of popular creeds. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals."

"The best lightning-rod for your protection is your own spine."

"Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debaucher of sentiment?"

"His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand to embody any capricious thought that is uppermost in her mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together by a subtle spiritual connection."

"Skepticism is slow suicide."

"Society undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet; he has a fine Geneva watch, but cannot tell the hour by the sun."

"These preachers of beauty, which light the world with their admonishing smile."

"A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection."

"It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no."

"There is a kind of latent omniscience not only in every man but in every particle."

"The next thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one"

"An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory."

"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting—a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing."

"To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."

"As soon as there is life there is danger."

"Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door."

"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."

"For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness."

"No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing."

"So gentle that he seemed only reading to one person, and yet his voice was so distinct that it filled the room in its lowest tones."

"That which struck me most, as distinguishing him from most other human beings, is nobility. He is a born nobleman."

"It was a maxim with him that power is not so much shown in talent or in successful performance as in tone; the absolute or the victorious tone ... He disliked limitations, and welcomed whatever promised to get rid of them, without always inquiring very closely what was left when they were removed."

"We, as we read," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in an essay on history, "must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly."

"England laughed at American authorship and we sent her Emerson..."

"Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists...Emerson supported territorial expansion at any cost but would have preferred it take place without war."

"He is the most original mind America has hitherto produced."

"He is a perfect swimmer on the ocean of modern existence. He dreads no tempest, for he is sure that calm will follow it."

"[A] great original thinker, who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. ... People that had lighted on a new thought or a thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary."

"[N]o one has had so steady and constant and above all so natural, a vision of what we require and what we are capable of in the way of aspiration and independence."

"He liked to taste but not to drink—least of all to become intoxicated."

"Emerson: German philosophy that in crossing the great water took some on underway."

"Act, if you like,—but you do it at your peril. Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament. The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and his friends cleave to the form, and lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monastery and his dance; and, although each prates of spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti-spiritual."

"In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation."

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

"How can he [today's writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public."

"The thing done avails, and not what is said about it. An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures."

"Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig."

"The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue."

"Solvency is maintained by means of the national debt, on the principle, "If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?""

"I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, — mettle and bottom."

"A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence."

"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."

"Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it."