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Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day.

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
Like
Heat
Fruit
Summer
Short
July
Dying
Swing
Pleasure
Swings
Fear
September
Death
Fill

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.
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Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.
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The dogma of the mystic offices of Christ being dropped, and he standing on his genius as a moral teacher, 'tis impossible to maintain the old emphasis of his personality and it recedes, as all persons must, before the sublimity of the moral laws.
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A man's action is only a poicture book of his creed.
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It is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, or ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As sunbeams stream through liberal space And nothing jostle or displace, So waved the pine-tree through my thought And fanned the dreams it never brought.
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Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The universal does not attract us until housed in an individual.
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It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every day, the sun and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him?
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Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the eclat in the universe. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis: therein is human power, in transference, not in creation & therein is human destiny, not in longevity but in removal. We dive & reappear in new places.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let there be worse cotton and better men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain. The mind does not create what it perceives, anymore than the eye creates the rose.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But we need not fear that we can lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which Nature has taken to heart.
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Why should all virtue work in one and the same way? Why should all give dollars? It is very inconvenient to us country folk, and we do not think any good will come of it. We have not dollars merchants have let them give them. Farmers will give corn poets will sing women will sew laborers will lend a hand the children will bring flowers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The narrow sectarian cannot read astronomy with impunity. The creeds of his church shrivel like dried leaves at the door of the observatory.
Ralph Waldo Emerson