Quote

Let there be worse cotton and better men.

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
Better
Men
Cotton
Worse
Peace

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image
No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
And, in fine, the ancient precept, Know thyself, and the modern precept, Study nature, become at last one maxim.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
There is always a best way of doing everything.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The age of puberty is a crisis in the age of man worth studying. It is the passage from the unconscious to the conscious from thesleep of passions to their rage.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not Devil's wine, but God's wine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Yet some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, and wherever the vein of thought reaches down into the profound, there is no danger from vanity. Solemn friends will warn them of the danger of the head's being turned by the flourish of trumpets, but they can afford to smile.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The dice of God are always loaded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Books are the best of things if well used if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The moral sense reappears today with the same morning newness that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say there is no religion now. 'Tis like saying in rainy weather, There is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of its superlative effects.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Meek young men grow up in colleges and believe it is their duty to accept the views which books have given, and grow up slaves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
It is with a good book as it is with good company.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
People say law but they mean wealth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson