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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

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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
Hero
Disappoint
Trust
Consistency
Eyes
Scare
Word
Reverence
Eye
Heroic
Loath
Others
Acts
Computing
Past
Data
Scares
Self
Terror
Orbit

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In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.
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The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He stands close to Nature he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes to be.
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There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.
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[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.
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We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.
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What a new face courage puts on everything!
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Noblesse oblige or, superior advantages bind you to larger generosity.
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The right eloquence needs no bell to call the people together, and no constable to keep them.
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What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of health.
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We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitering and recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall combine for thesalvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs.
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Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.
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I must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if they were mine,--and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he ispraised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden.
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The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.
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The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.
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I DO not count the hours I spend In wandering by the sea The forest is my loyal friend, Like God it useth me.
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What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.
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The gentleman is a man of truth.
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Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question.
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If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people, to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture.
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