Literary and Philosophical Quotes -- Poets and Dreamers -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson 3
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882. American writer, philosopher, and central figure of American transcendentalism. His poems, orations, and especially his essays, such as Nature (1836), are regarded as landmarks in the development of American thought and literary expression.
Dear to us are those who love us . . . but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.
Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.
By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.
Manners are the happy way 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. If they are superficial, so are the dewdrops which give such depth to the morning meadows.
If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.
What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.
More Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson: Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
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