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We are not free to use today, or to promise tomorrow, because we are already mortgaged to yesterday.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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
Past
Today
Mortgaged
Yesterday
Promise
Tomorrow
Already
Free
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More quotes by 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
The passive master lent his hand, To the vast Soul which o'er him planned.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The have a good friend is one of the greatest delights of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate. The right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist. Every thing must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition, to understand any thing rightly.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But I shall hear without pain, that I play the courtier very ill, and talk of that which I do not well understand.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
So each man, like each plant, has his parasites. A strong, astringent, bilious nature has more truculent enemies than the slugs and moths that fret my leaves. Such a one has curculios, borers, knife-worms a swindler ate him first, then a client, then a quack, then smooth, plausible gentlemen, bitter and selfish as Moloch.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy only the precursor of the reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
God is our name for the last generalization to which we can arrive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The beautiful laws of time and space, once dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey, it will yield us bees.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel, was never opened there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
And last of all, high over thought, in the world of morals, Fate appears as vindicator, levelling the high, lifting the low, requiring justice in man, and always striking soon or late when justice is not done. What is useful will last, what is hurtful will sink.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons, that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subservessuch as we see in the sexual attraction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A day is a miniature eternity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engraffed with a foreign stock.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
