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Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

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
First
Inches
Territory
Rational
Sea
Sun
Rights
Dies
Beneficent
Firsts
Inch

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The terrible tabulation of the French statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, then, in every twenty thousand, or thirty thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or marries his grandmother.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Wouldst thou shut up the avenues of ill, Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.
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Our statute is a currency which we stamp with our own portrait.
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The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
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Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks he is free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Great men exist that there might be greater men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take a single step that would bring them there.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The idea of God ends in a paltry Methodist meeting-house.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society always consists, in greatest part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of the courts and statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age.
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Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
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It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters, that whoever can speak can sing. So, probably, every man is eloquent once in his life. Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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How much of human life is lost in waiting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Imitation cannot go above its model.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is no man of Nature's worth In the circle of the earth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession', for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Everything in nature goes by law, and not by luck.
Ralph Waldo Emerson