The Conduct of Life Quotes

“The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life: By Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Eyes...They speak all languages.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life: By Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The frost which kills the harvest of a year, saves the harvests of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust. Wars, fires, plagues, break up immovable routine, clear the ground of rotten races and dens of distemper, and open a fair field to new men. There is a tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shatters a rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order. The sharpest evils are bent into that periodicity which makes the errors of planets, and the fevers and distempers of men, self-limiting. Nature is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We acquire the strength we have overcome. Without war, no soldier; without enemies, no hero.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life: By Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practical man relies on the language of the first.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life: By Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life: By Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life: By Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We rightly say of ourselves, we were born, and afterward we were born again, and many times. We have successive experiences so important, that the new forgets the old,”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life

“A man's fortunes are the fruit of his character.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life

“Money is representative, and follows the nature and fortunes of the owner...The farmer is covetous of his dollar, and with reason. It is no waif to him. He knows how many strokes of labor it represents. His bones ache with the days' work that earned it. He knows how much land it represents - how much rain, frost and sunshine. He knows that, in the dollar, he gives you so much discretion and patience, so much hoeing and threshing. Try to lift his dollar; you must lift all that weight. In the city, where money follows the skit of a pen or a lucky rise in exchange, it comes to be looked on as light.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life - Ralph Waldo Emerson (With Notes)(Biography)

“They should own who can administer, not they who hoard and conceal; not they who, the greater proprietors they are, are only the greater beggars, but they whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all. For he is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor; and how to give all access to the masterpieces of art and nature is the problem of civilization.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life

“The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life: By Ralph Waldo Emerson

“And evermore in the world is this marvellous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life

“The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we call Fate.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life

“That law of nature whereby everything climbs to higher platforms, and bodily vigor becomes mental and moral vigor. The bread he eats is first strength and animal spirits; it becomes, in higher laboratories, imagery and thought; and in still higher results, courage and endurance. This is the right compound interest; this is capital doubled, quadrupled, centupled; man raised to his highest power. The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation and not in augmenting animal existence.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life

“The virtues are economists, but some of the vices are also...Pride is handsome, economical; pride eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride. Pride can go without domestics, without fine clothes, can live in a house with two rooms, can eat potato, purslain, beans, lyed corn, can work on the soil, can travel afoot, can talk with poor men, or sit silent well contented in fine saloons. But vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last; a long way leading nowhere. Only one drawback; proud people are intolerably selfish, and the vain are gentle and giving.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct Of Life