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What is the end of human life? It is not, believe me, the chief end of man that he should make a fortune and beget children whose end is likewise to make a fortune, but it is, in few words, that he should explore himself.
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
Believe
Chiefs
Make
Fortune
Men
Whose
Thinking
Words
Beget
Life
Ends
Likewise
Human
Begets
Humans
Explore
Children
Chief
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters, that whoever can speak can sing. So, probably, every man is eloquent once in his life. Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle everything else is an intrigue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The right eloquence needs no bell to call the people together, and no constable to keep them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a crack in everything God has made
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last,--a long way leading nowhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For the existing world is not a dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as a dream neither is it a disease but it is the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Go where he will, the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sorrow makes us all children again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is quite beautiful alone nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,--what ample borrowers of eternity they are!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All my hurts my garden spade can heal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
