Quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson - page 18
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It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.
There are always two parties;
the establishment and the movement.
Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
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A great man is always willing to be little.
To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty.
Every great achievement is the victory of a flaming heart.
Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can.
The wise man, the true friend, the finished character, we seek everywhere, and only find in fragments.
Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.
It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree.
The house praises the carpenter.
If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.
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.
Personal rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the census: property demands a government framedon the ratio of owners and of owning.
Every man finds a sanction for his simplest claims and deeds, in decisions of his own mind, which he calls Truth and Holiness.
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At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her.
