Quote

I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River, when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

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
Wish
River
Mother
Originals
Book
Tongue
Think
Rivers
Thinking
Across
Rendered
Soon
Charles
Books
Boston
Reading
Swimming

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image
It is hard to mesmerize ourselves, to whip our own top but through sympathy we are capable of energy and endurance. Concert fires people to a certain fury of performance they can rarely reach alone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
How can he [today's writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself when he loses himself in the crowd when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Everything intercepts us from ourselves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Do what you know and perception is converted into character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff the ploughman, the plough, and the furrow, are of one stuff and the stuff is such, and so much, that the variations of form are unimportant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a god- like ease and power.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Could Shakespeare give a theory of Shakespeare?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it....we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Intemperance is the only vulgarity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Nothing can be more delicate without being fantastical, nothing more firm and based in nature and sentiment, than the courtship and mutual carriage of the sexes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
For, the advantages which fashion values, are plants which thrive in very confined localities, in a few streets, namely. Out of this precinct, they go for nothing are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in education.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Any relation to the land, the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who merely uses it as a support to his desk and ledger, or to his manufactory, values it less.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy only the precursor of the reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson