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Let there be worse cotton and better men.
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
Cotton
Worse
Peace
Better
Men
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The masters painted for joy, and knew not that virtue had gone out of them. They could not paint the like in cold blood. The masters of English lyric wrote their songs so. It was a fine efflorescence of fine powers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is bad enough that our geniuses cannot do anything useful, but it is worse that no man is fit for society who has fine traits.He is admired at a distance, but he cannot come near without appearing a cripple.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Go out of the house to see the moon, and't is mere tinsel it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We do what we must, and call it by the best names.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
People who know how to act are never preachers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth gathers itself spotless and unhurt after all our surrenders and concealments and partisanship never hurt by the treachery or ruin of its best defenders, whether Luther, or William Penn, or St. Paul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Remarkable trait in the American Character is the union, not very infrequent, of Yankee cleverness with spiritualism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ever fresh the broad creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds, A single will, a million deeds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Examples are cited by soldiers, of men who have seen the cannon pointed, and the fire given to it, and who have stepped aside from he path of the ball. The terrors of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlour and the cabin.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A strong person makes the law and custom null before his own will.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The finished man of the world must eat of every apple once.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The terrors of the child are quite reasonable, and add to his loveliness for his utter ignorance and weakness, and his enchanting indignation on such a small basis of capital compel every bystander to take his part.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
