Come, see the north-wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, naught cares he
For number or proportion.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, The Snow-Storm
All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal?
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Essays
It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, speech at the Masonic Temple in Boston, January 1842
Truth gathers itself spotless and unhurt after all our surrenders and concealments and partisanship.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "The Sovereignty of Ethics", Select Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
A sect or a party is an elegant incognito, devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, journal entry, June 20, 1831
Prayer that craves a particular commodity -- any thing less than all good -- is vicious.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Self-Reliance"
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity--no, nor of any want except of being wanting to himself.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks: 1838-1842
Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, "If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?"
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Ability
Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Letters and Social Aims
A great man is always willing to be little.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Compensation", Select Essays and Poems
The child walks amid heaps of illusions, which he does not like to have disturbed.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Illusions", The Conduct of Life
I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life. Children, youths, adults, and old men, all are led by one bawble or another.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Illusions", The Conduct of Life
There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream. The toys, to be sure, are various, and are graduated in refinement to the quality of the dupe. The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Illusions", The Conduct of Life
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Experience", Essays: Second Series
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, journal entry, July 21, 1836
The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, The Conduct of Life
A good intention clothes itself with sudden power.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Essays
Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual's character. Now to no other man can its wisdom appear as it does to him, for every man must be supposed to see a little further on his own proper path than any one else. Therefore, just and wise men take umbrage at his act, until after some little time be past: then they see it to be in unison with their acts. All prudent men see that the action is clean contrary to a sensual prosperity; for every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Heroism", Essays
Toward all this external evil, the man within the breast assumes a warlike attitude, and affirms his ability to cope single-handed with the infinite army of enemies. To this military attitude of the soul we give the name of Heroism. Its rudest form is the contempt for safety and ease, which makes the attractiveness of war. It is a self-trust which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Heroism", Essays
Times of heroism are generally times of terror.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Heroism", Essays
Men live on the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which yet they never enter, and with their hand on the doorlatch they die outside.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Selected Letters
I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, oration read before the Mechanics' Apprentices' Library Association at the Masonic Temple in Boston, MA, "Man the Reformer"
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