Emerson Quotes

“Well,' I said. 'I could strip off my clothes and reveal to you that under my jeans and sweatshirt I'm actually wearing a tank top and short-shorts, much like Lara Croft from Tomb Raider...only mine are flame-retardant and covered in glow-in-the-dark dinosaur stickers.'
No one stirred. Not even Christopher, who actually has a thing for Lara Croft.
'I know what you're thinking,' I went on. 'Glow-in-the-dark dinosaur stickers are so last year. But I think they add a certain je ne sais quoi to the whole ensemble. It's true, short-shorts are uncomfortable under jeans and hard to get off in the ladies' room, but they make the twin thigh-holsters in which I hold my high-caliber pistols so easy to get to....'
The oven timer dinged.
'Thank you, Em,' Mr. Greer said, yawning. 'That was very persuasive.”
― Meg Cabot, Airhead

“In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Love what is simple and beautiful.
These are the essentials.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Tao of Emerson the Tao of Emerson

“Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Culture, Behavior, Beauty, Books, Art, Eloquence, Power, Wealth, Illusions

“...DAMNATION!'

No device of the printer's art, not even capital letters, can indicate the intensity of that shriek of rage. Emerson is known to his Egyptian workers by the admiring sobriquet of Father of Curses. The volume as well as the content of his remarks earned him the title; but this shout was extraordinary even by Emerson's standards, so much so that the cat Bastet, who had become more or less accustomed to him, started violently, and fell with a splash into the bathtub.

The scene that followed is best not described in detail. My efforts to rescue the thrashing feline were met with hysterical resistance; water surged over the edge of the tub and onto the floor; Emerson rushed to the rescue; Bastet emerged in one mighty leap, like a whale broaching, and fled -- cursing, spitting, and streaming water. She and Emerson met in the doorway of the bathroom.

The ensuing silence was broken by the quavering voice of the safragi, the servant on duty outside our room, inquiring if we required his assistance. Emerson, seated on the floor in a puddle of soapy water, took a long breath. Two of the buttons popped off his shirt and splashed into the water. In a voice of exquisite calm he reassured the servant, and then transferred his bulging stare to me.

I trust you are not injured, Peabody. Those scratches...'

The bleeding has almost stopped, Emerson. It was not Bastet's fault.'

It was mine, I suppose,' Emerson said mildly.

Now, my dear, I did not say that. Are you going to get up from the floor?'

No,' said Emerson.

He was still holding the newspaper. Slowly and deliberately he separated the soggy pages, searching for the item that had occasioned his outburst. In the silence I heard Bastet, who had retreated under the bed, carrying on a mumbling, profane monologue. (If you ask how I knew it was profane, I presume you have never owned a cat.)”
― Elizabeth Peters, The Deeds of the Disturber

“Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.”
― David Markson

“Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes much impression on him, and another none.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

“He smiled affably at the burglar, a burly fellow whom he continued to hold with one hand, as easily as if he had been a child. The entire household had been aroused, and a good number of them had joined in, shouting questions and brandishing various deadly instruments. The burglar glared wildly at Emerson, bare to the waist and bulging with muscle - at Gargery and his cudgel - at Selim, fingering a knife even longer than Nefret's - at assorted footmen armed with pokers, spits, and cleavers - and at the giant form of Daoud advancing purposefully toward him. 'It's a bleedin' army!' he gurgled. 'The lyin' barstard said you was some kind of professor!”
― Elizabeth Peters, The Falcon at the Portal

“In 1881, being on a visit to Boston, my wife and I found ourselves in the Parker House with the Ingersoll's, and went over to Charleston to hear him lecture. His subject was 'Some Mistakes of Moses,' and it was a memorable experience. Our lost leaders, -- Emerson, Thoreau, Theodore Parker, -- who had really spoken to disciples rather than to the nation, seemed to have contributed something to form this organ by which their voice could reach the people. Every variety of power was in this orator, -- logic and poetry, humor and imagination, simplicity and dramatic art, moral and boundless sympathy. The wonderful power which Washington's Attorney-general, Edmund Randolph, ascribed to Thomas Paine of insinuating his ideas equally into learned and unlearned had passed from Paine's pen to Ingersoll's tongue. The effect on the people was indescribable. The large theatre was crowded from pit to dome. The people were carried from plaudits of his argument to loud laughter at his humorous sentences, and his flexible voice carried the sympathies of the assembly with it, at times moving them to tears by his pathos.

{Conway's thoughts on the great Robert Ingersoll}”
― Moncure Daniel Conway, My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East

“See yonder leafless tree against the sky,
How they diffuse themselves into the air,
And ever subdividing separate,
Limbs into branches, branches into twigs,
As if they loved the element, & hasted
To dissipate their being into it.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations

“The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (With Notes)(Biography)

“But as this fugitive sunlight
Arrested & fixed
And with the primal atoms mixed
Is plant & man & rock
So a fleeing thought
Taken up in act & wrought
Makes the air & the sun
And hurls new systems out to run”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations

“The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“Among those who could read, books were prized possessions. Words on paper were powerful magic, seductive as music, sharp as a knife at times, or gentle as a kiss. Friendships and love affairs blossomed as men and women read to each other in summer meadows and winter kitchens. Pages were ambrosia in their hands. A new novel or collection of poems was something everybody talked about. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Bronte, Austen, Dickens, Keats, Emerson, Cooper, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Twain. To read these authors was to go on a grand adventure and see things as you never had before, see yourself as you never had before.”
― Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America

“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be,”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I carry the dust of a journey, That cannot be shaken away. It lives deep within me, For I breathe it every day.”
― Greg Lake

“Atom from atom yawns as far
As moon from earth, or star from star.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations

“Sorrow makes us all children again[,] destroys all differences of intellect[.] The wisest know nothing[.]”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The first sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s that reached me still jolts me every time I run into it. “Meek young men,” he wrote in “The American Scholar,” “grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books…”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process

“Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or safe.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Oblivion here thy wisdom is,
Thy thrift, the sleep of cares;
For a proud idleness like this
Crowns all thy mean affairs.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations

“If only I have right of seeing
In this wilderness of being
And from the vision glorious
Must come back to my lonely house.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations

“It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to one. The faith that stands on authority is not faith.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“Tis not in the high stars alone,
Nor in the cup of budding flowers,
Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone,
Nor in the bow that smiles in showers,
But in the mud and scum of things
There alway, alway something sings.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations

“As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its owns books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar; Self-Reliance. Compensation

“Life," said Emerson, "consists in what a man is thinking all day." If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine. I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at night.
But I don’t ask to go back to America, to be put in a double harness again, to work the treadmill. No, I prefer to be a poor man of Europe. God knows, I am poor enough; it only remains to be a man.”
― Henry Miller

“Life," said Emerson, "consists in what a man is thinking all day." If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine. I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at night.
But I don’t ask to go back to America, to be put in a double harness again, to work the treadmill. No, I prefer to be a poor man of Europe. God knows, I am poor enough; it only remains to be a man.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Yet however much he read, there were whole categories of books the mature Emerson would not read. He would not read theology or academic controversy. He wanted original accounts, first-hand experience, personal witness. He would read your poem or your novel, but not your opinion of someone else’s poem or novel, let alone your opinion of someone else’s opinion…”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process