Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is comic or pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only attend towhat addresses the senses.

A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.

Enthusiasm is the height of man; it is the passing from the human to the divine.

Only by obedience to his genius; only by the freest activity in the way constitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise beforea man, and lead him by the hand out of all the wards of the prison.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth whispers, 'I can.

Far off, men swell, bully, and threaten; bring them hand to hand, and they are feeble folk.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

Genius seems to consist merely in trueness of sight, in using such words as show that the man was an eye-witness, and not a repeater of what was told.

We flee away from cities, but we bring The best of cities, these learned classifiers, Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts.

I think no virtue goes with size;The reason of all cowardiceIs, that men are overgrown,And, to be valiant, must come downTo the titmouse dimension.

The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.

Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds: 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.

The whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that men are convertible.

Real men don't conform to the beliefs of others, even when society has concluded on what is good and true, but maintain the integrity of their own mind.

Men wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices.

The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.

Those who listened to Lord Chatham felt that there was something finer in the man, than anything which he said.

Some men, at the approach of a dispute, neigh like horses.

No man can help another without helping himself.

A man often pays dear for a small frugality.

It is a capital blunder; as you discover, when another man recites his charities.

A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.

Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man.