Quote

The Gods we worship write their names on our faces be sure of that. And a man will worship something ... That which dominates will determine his life and character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

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
Write
Determine
Character
Careful
Writing
Worship
Something
Therefore
Men
Becoming
Behooves
Life
Names
Dominates
Sure
Worshipping
Faces
Gods

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
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Fate is unpenetrated causes.
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We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected.
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Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
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If you take in a lie, you must take in all that belongs to it.
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But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.
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Nothing is quite beautiful alone nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.
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The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery?
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Necessity does everything well. In our condition of universal dependence, it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, and to give all that is asked, though at great inconvenience.
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There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?
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As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Immitation is suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am the owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year, of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain, Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geological structure of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all men's thinkings run laterally, never vertically.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Tomorrow is a new day begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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And in cases where profound conviction has been wrought, the eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief. It agitates and tears him, and perhaps almost bereaves him of the power of articulation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Daughter of heaven and earth, coy Spring, With sudden passion languishing, Teaching barren moors to smile, Painting pictures mile on mile, Holds a cup of cowslip wreaths Whence a smokeless incense breathes.
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Do not spill thy soul in running hither and yon, grieving over the mistakes and the vices of others. The one person whom it is most necessary to reform is yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom--in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unraveled, nor shown.
Ralph Waldo Emerson