Quote

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.

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
Ships
Line
Hundred
Lines
Tacks
Best
Zigzag
Voyage
Voyages
Ship

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image
Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
A man must know how to estimate a sour face. The sour face of the multitude, like thier sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and the newspaper directs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock aswell as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common, with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
What I need is someone who will make me do what I can.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Come out of the azure. Love the day. Do not leave the sky out of your landscape.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
What is civilization? I answer, the power of good women.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you, or quietly drops you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
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
Image
If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages and liberates us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
There is a crack in everything God has made
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no man's work but came by wide social labor, whena thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
A man's wife has more power over him than the state has.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem the shepherd, his lamb the farmer, corn the miner, a stone the painter, his picture the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Test of the poet is knowledge of love, For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove Never was poet, of late or of yore, Who was not tremulous with love-lore.
Ralph Waldo Emerson