Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find,

but symmetrical men never.

Each age,

it is found,

must write its own books;

or rather,

each generation for the next succeeding.

The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing.

The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

Nothing astonishes men

so much as common sense and plain dealing.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

If the tongue had not been

framed for articulation,

man would still be a beast in the forest.

In skating over thin ice

our safety is in our speed.

Beauty is an outward gift,

which is seldom despised,

except by those to whom,

it has been refused.

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon.

We are never tired,

so long as we can see far enough.

Passion rebuilds the world for the youth.

It makes all things alive and significant.

This time,

like all times,

is a very good one,

if we but know what to do with it.

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us

to be what we know we could be.

An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

Good is positive.

Evil is merely privative,

not absolute: it is like cold,

which is the privation of heat.

All evil is so much death or nonentity.

Benevolence is absolute and real.

So much benevolence as a man hath,

so much life hath he.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

Win as if you were used to it,

lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.

The end of the human race

will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

If the stars should appear but one

night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.