Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you.

America is a country of young men.

Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers. Christian Bovee A little praise Goes a great ways.

The flowering of geometry.

Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestions, the raw material of possible poems and histories.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

We look wishfully to emergencies, to eventful, revolutionary times ... and think how easy to have taken our part when the drum was rolling and the house was burning over our heads.

They sicken of the calm that know the storm.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

We change, whether we like it or not.

Character is that which can do without success.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

A sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star.

If you would lift me you must be on a higher ground.

An institution is the lengthening shadow of one man.

He that rides his hobby gently must always give way to him that rides his hobby hard.

We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.

I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.

With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. ... Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today.

Culture, with us, ends in headache.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate.