Quote

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effiminated by position of nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

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
Personal
Halt
Position
Conservatism
Parent
Conservatives
Politics
Defects
Born
Luxury
Nature
Conservative
Like
Blind
Invalids
Parents
Defensive

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image
The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Great conversation ... requires an absolute running of two souls into one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,--what ample borrowers of eternity they are!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Looking at God instantly reduces our disposition to dissent from our brother.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
We are not free to use today, or to promise tomorrow, because we are already mortgaged to yesterday.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
We are imprisoned in life in the company of persons powerfully unlike us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first for example, a well-laid garden and nothing seems worth doing but the laying~out of gardens.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The course of everything goes to teach us faith.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
First be a good animal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
In spite of warnings, change rarely occurs until the status quo becomes more painful than change. People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
I suppose an entire cabinet of shells would be an expression of the whole human mind a Flora of the whole globe would be so likewise, or a history of beasts or a painting of all the aspects of the clouds. Everything is significant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
By virtue of the Deity thought renews itself inexhaustibly every day and the thing whereon it shines, though it were dust and sand, is a new subject with countless relations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The writer, like a priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health he must be at the top of his condition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Two sorts of writers possess genius: those who think, and those who cause others to think.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Nature is the symbol of Spirit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson