Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
That man is idle who can do something better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Idleness
Laziness
Idle
Better
Something
Men
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
I like people who like Plato.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man's life is a progress, not a station.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Natural religion supplies still all the facts which are disguised under the dogma of popular creeds. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man who would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We love it because it is self dependent, self derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the East loves infinity, the West delights in boundaries.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we callFate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is man born for but to be a Reformer, a Remaker of what man has made? A renouncer of lies a restorer of truth and good? Imitating that great Nature which embossoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, with every breath a new life?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not gold, but only man can make a people great and strong men who, for truth and honor's sake, stand fast and suffer long.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or a mollusk, and isolated it-which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world shall last his days.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain. The mind does not create what it perceives, anymore than the eye creates the rose.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only poetry inspires poetry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation but he shuts the door of truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses sing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
