Quotes About Emerson

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

Emerson wrote, 'A good indignation brings out all one's powers.' I would think that all three of us should be indignant and, with our combined powers, we should be invincible.

Vanderbilt remarried, this time wedding Margaret Emerson, heiress to a trove of money that owed its existence to America's awful diet and its gastric consequences, the Bromo-Seltzer fortune.

Every time the mainstream media talk about progressive rock, they wheel out a clip of Rick Wakeman in a cape. For me, it's one of the most ambitious forms of music. The problem is that when it doesn't work, you end up with Emerson, Lake and Palmer doing symphonies with 60-piece orchestras and revolving pianos, which I think is ridiculous as well.

Part of the power of Emerson's individualism is his insistence, at crucial moments, that individualism does not mean isolation or self-sufficiency. This is not a paradox, for it is only the strong individual who can frankly concede the sometimes surprising extent of his own dependence.

John Jay Chapman said of Emerson that, great as he was, a visitor from Mars would learn less about life on earth from him than from Italian opera, for the opera at least suggested that there were two sexes.

You'll want to read books - novels, because ladies are frivolous; poetry because ladies are sentimental; and sermons, because we are pious. If you must read essays, Mr. Emerson might be best. Your gentleman may have a nodding acquaintance with his works.

Emerson then incarnated the moral optimism, the progress, and the energy of the American spirit.

Emerson said, "To the dull mind, all of nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world sparkles with light." The illumined mind has shifted to the light.

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

Marc Almond: David came along with this thing called a synthesizer, which at that time we only really knew from the likes of Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman, who had huge banks of them. Eno had used one in Roxy Music, and I remember them on The Old Grey Whistle Test playing a ten-minute version of 'Ladytron', one of the greatest things I've ever seen on television.

My whole interest in food grew from my interest in gardens and the question of how we engage with the natural world. To go back even further, I got interested in gardens because I was interested in nature and wilderness and Thoreau and Emerson.

When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that William James was honored to be asked to speak at a centenary celebration.

The soul cannot be intellectually grasped or scientifically examined, Emerson insisted; it can only be felt, loved, and enjoyed. Through our individual souls, we have direct access to the universal soul—God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson would definitely be my homeboy.

Four very strange and truly poetic human beings in this century have attained mastery in prose, for which this century was not made otherwise—for lack of poetry, as I have suggested. Not including Goethe, who may fairly be claimed by the century that produced him, I regard only Giacomo Leopardi, Prosper Mérimée, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walter Savage Landor, the author of Imaginary Conversations, as worthy of being called masters of prose.35 93

Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.

All substances the cunning chemist Time Melts down into that liquor of my life.

The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of life.

The brevity of human life gives a melancholy to the profession of the architect.

If an inhabitant of another planet should visit the earth, he would receive, on the whole, a truer notion of human life by attending an Italian opera than he would by reading Emerson's volumes. He would learn from the Italian opera that there were two sexes; and this, after all, is probably the fact with which the education of such a stranger ought to begin.

The foolish face of praise,'" Uncle Frosty quoted. "'. . . the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease, in answer to conversation which does not interest us.'" "Who wrote that?" I asked in astonishment. "Emerson.

The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?

Most of the shadows of this life," observed Ralph Waldo Emerson, "are caused by our standing in our own sunshine.