Quote

Each age, it is found, must write its own books or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Age: 78 †
Born: 1803
Born: May 25
Died: 1882
Died: April 27
Biographer
Diarist
Essayist
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
Found
Greatness
Next
Generation
Succeed
Book
Generations
Must
Books
Writing
Age
Rather
Succeeding
Write
Birthday

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image
Cowardice shuts the eyes till the sky is not larger than a calf-skin: shuts the eyes so that we cannot see the horse that is running away with us worse, shuts the eyes of the mind and chills the heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The gates of thought, - how slow and late they discover themselves! Yet when they appear, we see that they were always there, always open.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Conservatism is affluent and openhanded, but there is a cunning juggle in riches. I observe that they take somewhat for everythingthey give. I look bigger, but am less I have more clothes, but am nit so warm more armor, but less courage more books, but less wit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The world is his who can see through its pretension.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Senators and presidents have climbed so high with pain enough, not because they think the place specially agreeable, but as an apology for real worth, and to vindicate their manhood in our eyes. This conspicuous chair is their compensation to themselves for being of a poor, cold, hard nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Power ceases in the instant of repose it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go, and is only right admirable when to all its beauty and speed a subserviency to the will, like that of walking, is added.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The masters painted for joy, and knew not that virtue had gone out of them. They could not paint the like in cold blood. The masters of English lyric wrote their songs so. It was a fine efflorescence of fine powers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy only the precursor of the reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Is not prayer a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The highest end of government is the culture of men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Our health is our sound relation to external objects our sympathy with external being.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
As men get on in life, they acquire a love for sincerity, and somewhat less solicitude to be lulled or amused. In the progress ofthe character, there is an increasing faith in the moral sentiment, and a decreasing faith in propositions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Great men exist that there might be greater men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem the shepherd, his lamb the farmer, corn the miner, a stone the painter, his picture the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson