Quote

A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.

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
Men
Legs
Drown
Fingers
Dilemma
Among
Drowning
Gives
Sympathetic
Persons
Finger
Person
Placed
Giving
Sympathy
Much
Catch
Swimmer

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Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong.
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Let no one honour me with tears, or bury me with lamentation. Why? Because I fly hither and thither, living in the mouths of me.
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Honor and fortune exist for him who always recognizes the neighborhood of the great, always feels himself in the presence of high causes.
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Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought for causes which are unpenetrated.
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How much better when the whole land is a garden, and the people have grown up in the bowers of a paradise.
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The last change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air.
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Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.
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Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.
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The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread.
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Under every deep a lower deep opens.
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We change whether we like it or not.
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Mankind divides itself into two classes,--benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast the first a handful.
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Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.
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The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.
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I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of men.
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What a new face courage puts on everything!
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It is the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society. Fine society is only a self-protection against the vulgarities of the street and the tavern.
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We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him?
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