Quotes About Influence

You think me the child of my circumstances: I make my circumstance.

But the President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.

Glück ist ein Parfüm, das du nicht auf andere sprühen kannst, ohne selbst ein paar Tropfen abzubekommen.

A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, — a possession for all time.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I've eaten; even so, they have made me.

Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better.

1842  Son Waldo (age 5) dies of scarlet fever.  Journalist Walt Whitman (age 23) attends Emerson's lecture on poetry in New York City. In his report for the New York Aurora, Whitman writes that it was the "richest and most beautiful" lecture he'd ever heard. On the same New York trip, Emerson becomes godfather to newborn William James, son of his friend, Henry James, Sr.

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.

The right eloquence needs no bell to call the people together, and no constable to keep them. It draws the children from their play, the old from their arm-chairs, the invalid from his warm chamber: it holds the hearer fast; steals away his feet, that he shall not depart; his memory, that he shall not remember the most pressing affairs; his belief, that he shall not admit any opposing considerations.

Lo que haces resuena con tal fuerza por encima de tu cabeza, que no me deja oír lo que dices.

Don't choose the better person, choose the person who makes a better you.

Es tan malo, entonces, el ser mal interpretado? Pitágoras fue mal interpretado, y lo fueron Sócrates, Jesús, Lutero y Galileo, y lo fueron todos los espíritus puros y graves que han honrado a la humanidad. Ser grande es ser mal comprendido.

Men of character are the conscience of the society to which they belong.

If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused. I notice too, that the ground on which eminent public servants urge the claims of popular education is fear: This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats.

All my good is magnetic, and I educate, not by lessons, but by going about my business.

There is the power of complexions, obviously modifying the dispositions and sentiments.

nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.

Cada hombre auténtico es una causa, un país, y una era.

Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries.

The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar, is, the mind of the Past,—in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth,—learn the amount of this influence more conveniently,—by considering their value alone.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.