Quote

There is nothing we value and hunt and cultivate and strive to draw to us, but in some hour we turn and rend it.

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
Hour
Destruction
Rend
Value
Hunt
Turn
Hunts
Hours
Cultivate
Turns
Draw
Values
Strive
Nothing
Draws

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image
We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are thevictims of these details, and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The reason why all men honor love is because it looks up, and not down aspires and not despairs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
One of our statesmen said, The curse of this country is eloquent men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Every man is as lazy as he dares to be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Of Nature itself upon the soul the sunrise, the haze of autumn, the winter starlight seem interlocutors the prevailing sense is that of an exposition in poetry a high discourse, the voice of the speaker seems to breathe as much from the landscape as from his own breast it is Nature communing with the seer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Thought is the blossom language the bud action the fruit behind it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda-these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Words are alive. Cut them and they bleed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
For all symbols are fluxional all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.
Ralph Waldo Emerson