Quote

The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

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
Simply
Hurt
Evil
Hurting
Helping
Ethics
Better
Integrity
Good
Morality
Worse
Meaning

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image
The Oversoul is before Time, and Time, Father of all else, is one of his children.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
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
Image
The whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that men are convertible.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
And what is Genius but finer love, a love impersonal, a love of the flower and perfection of things, and a desire to draw a new picture or copy of the same? It looks to the cause and life: it proceeds from within outward, whilst Talent goes from without inward.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Talent for talent's sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The vanishing, volatile froth of the present which any shadow will alter, any thought blow away, any event annihilate, is every moment converted into the adamantine.
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
The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
We stand against fate, as children stand up against the wall in their father's house, and notch their height from year to year. But when the boy grows to a man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that wall and builds it new and bigger.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Two sorts of writers possess genius: those who think, and those who cause others to think.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The world leaves no track in space, and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast idea.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity. All men, all things, the state, the church, yea the friends of the heart are phantasms and unreal beside the sanctuary of the heart. With so much awe, with so much fear, let it be respected.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Life is girt all round with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky. ... These road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must extend the area of life and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a property in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
America is another name for opportunity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
You cannot make a cheap palace.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
If your friend has displeased you, you shall not sit down to consider it, for he has already lost all memory of the passage, and has doubled his power to serve you, and, ere you can rise up again, will burden you with blessings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Manners are the happy ways of doing things each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.
Ralph Waldo Emerson