Quote

Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.

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
Stanza
Outweighs
Prose
Poetry
Single
Makes
Book

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image
The Sun is the sole inconsumable fireAnd God is the sole inexhaustible Giver.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
It is the duty of men to judge men only by their actions. Our faculties furnish us with no means of arriving at the motive, the character, the secret self. We call the tree good from its fruits, and the man, from his works.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Society always consists, in greatest part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of the courts and statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
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
Image
We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
A human being should beware how he laughs, for then he shows all his faults.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
It is the ignorant and childish part of mankind that is the fighting part. Idle and vacant minds want excitement
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Take the place and attitude to which you see your unquestionable right, and all men acquiesce.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
For the resolute and determined, there is time and opportunity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration out there in history we can see its fatal strength.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
When a whole nation is roaring patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Every young man is prone to be misled by the suggestions of his own ill-founded ambition which he mistakes for the promptings of asecret genius, and thence dreams of unrivaled greatness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Don't make a novel to establish a principle of political economy. You will spoil both.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by language and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson