Quotes About Emerson

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-pulling, but guiding, instructive, and inspirational--a south wind and not an east wind.

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

all nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself.

Many times the reading of a book has made the fortune of the man-has decided his way of life. 'Tis a tie between men to have been delighted with the same book.

The universal soul is the alone creator of the useful and the beautiful; therefore to make anything useful or beautiful, the individual must be submitted to the universal mind.

LANGUAGE is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature is the vehicle, and threefold degree.

me; and which, as they have always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both history and prophecy. 'The foundations

This outlook, one that said that American history must be the history of nature speaking through men, not of men shaping nature, became the single most powerful force in American intellectual life in the nineteenth century and shaped some of America's greatest works of literature, such as Moby Dick, Leaves of Grass and Walden, as well as generating an American school of philosophy , to be furthered by William James and John Dewey.

was a melancholy introvert who declined to join in philosophical discussions.)   The Concord circle of sympathetically-minded thinkers, writers, and social activists became known as Transcendentalists. What exactly is Transcendentalism? That's the question Emerson set out to answer at Boston's Masonic Temple in 1842. In addition to defining his own philosophy, this lecture planted the seeds of the modern self-help and personal development movements.

Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth,—is the fundamental law of criticism.

Yankee Lady, sent by Emerson, who has discovered that the 'Man Shakespear' is a Myth, and did not write those plays that bear his name, which were on the contrary written by a 'Secret Associate' (names unknown): she has actually come to England for the purposes of examining that, and if possible, proving it … Ach Gott!

The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him.

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

I know of no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as that of tenacity of purpose...

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth

Spirit, that made those heroes dare To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight which a verse gives in happy quotation than in the poem.

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.

The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

Thought is the blossom language the bud action the fruit behind it.