Quote

Only that is poetry which cleanses and mans me.

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
Cleanses
Mans
Poetry

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image
The soul lets no man go without some visitations and holy-days of a diviner presence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and...it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path.... He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The beautiful is never plentiful.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Beside all the moral benefit which we may expect from the farmer's profession, when a man enters it considerately, this promised the conquering of the soil, plenty, and beyond this, the adorning of the country with every advantage and ornament which labor, ingenuity, and affection for a man's home, could suggest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Things bring their own philosophy with them, that is, prudence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The scholar may lose himself in schools, in words, and become a pedant but when he comprehends his duties, he above all men is arealist, and converses with things.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
If you follow the suburban fashion in building a sumptuous- looking house for a little money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap, dear house.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it.
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 certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
A new degree of intellectual power seems cheap at any price.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Pictures must not be too picturesque.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
You think me the child of circumstance I make my circumstance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Health is the first muse, comprising the magical benefits of air, landscape, and bodily exercise on the mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Congratulate yourself if you have done something strange, extravagant and broken the monotony.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
You will think me very pedantic, gentlemen, but holiday though it may be, I have not the smallest interest in any holiday, except as it celebrates real and not pretended joys.
Ralph Waldo Emerson