Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes - Page 5

Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.

Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.

The foremost watchman on the peak announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken, and the phrase will be th fittest, most musical, and the unerring voice of the world for that time.

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

Quotation confesses inferiority.

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.

We are wiser than we know.

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong

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. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Miss Austen’s novels … seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer … is marriageableness.