Quote

If it costs ten years, and ten to recover the general prosperity, the destruction of the South is worth so much.

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
Destruction
South
General
Cost
Worth
Recover
War
Costs
Much
Prosperity
Years
Ten

More quotes by 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
Sentimentalists ... adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel.... Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,--his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,--fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The soul refuses limits and always affirms an optimism, never a pessimism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every society, and men unconsciously seek for it in each other.
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
Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Art is a jealous mistress and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Perhaps love is only the highest symbol of friendship, as all other things seem symbols of love.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
We pass for what we are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments into their heaven, and so fully engage us, that we take no thought forthe morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The frost which kills the harvest of a year saves the harvest of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The house is a castle which the King cannot enter.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
My doom and my strength is to be solitary.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
'Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men - that is genius... Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist... What I must do, is all that concerns me not what the people think... Nothing can bring you peace but yourself nothing, but the triumph of principles.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
A scholar is a man with his inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson