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Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the fruit.

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
Sometimes
Burrs
Hedges
Protects
Rare
Fruit
Protect
Heaven
Odium
Character
Burr

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Though thou loved her as thyself, As a self of purer clay, Tho' her parting dims the day, Stealing grace from all alive, Heartily know, When half-gods go, The gods arrive.
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Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the toughfibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.
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The eye is the best of artists.
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The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive.
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He that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves
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Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament.
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Flowers are the earth laughing.
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The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society is the stage on which manners are shown novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.
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Hidden away in the inner nature of the real man is the law of his life, and someday he will discover it and consciously make use of it. He will heal himself, make himself happy and prosperous, and life in an entirely different world. For he will have discovered that life is from within and not from without.
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Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms.
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All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do.... Build, therefore, your own world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Without looking, then, to those extraordinary social influences which are now acting in precisely this direction, but only at whatis inevitably doing around us, I think we must regard the land as a commanding and increasing power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Man's life is a progress, not a station.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Power is what they want, not candy-power to execute their design, power to give legs and feet, form and actuality to their thought which, to a clear-sighted man, appears the end for which the universe exists, and all its resources might be well applied.
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Other world? There is no other world here or nowhere is the whole fact.
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We might as easily reprove the east wind, or the frost, as a political party, whose members, for the most part, could give no account of their position, but stand for the defence of those interests in which they find themselves.
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The Times are the masquerade of the eternities trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history the quarry out of which the genius of today is building up the Future.
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The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson