Quote

Every natural action is graceful.

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
Graceful
Natural
Action
Every

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image
The best political economy is the care and culture of men for, in these crises, all are ruined except such as are proper individuals, capable of thought, and of new choice and the application of their talent to new labor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
We come to our own and would make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We can never part with it the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is rock, the ground, to our eyes, and hands, and feet. It is firm water: it is cold flame: what health, what affinity!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
See only that thou work and thou canst not escape the reward.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
It never was in the power of any man or any community to call the arts into being. They come to serve his actual wants, never to please his fancy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
If it costs ten years, and ten to recover the general prosperity, the destruction of the South is worth so much.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The student is to read history actively and not passively to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the muse of history will utter oracles as never to those who do not respect themselves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Use makes a better soldier than the most urgent considerations of duty,--familiarity with danger enabling him to estimate the danger. He sees how much is the risk, and is not afflicted with imagination knows practically Marshal Saxe's rule, that every soldier killed costs the enemy his weight in lead.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Skepticism is slow suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
An answer in words is delusive it is really no answer to the questions you ask.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The world exists, as I understand it, to teach the science of liberty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Each age, it is found, must write its own books or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The man for whom the law exists - the man of forms, the conservative - is a tame man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson