Quote

Read proudly--put the duty of being read invariably on the author. If he is not read, whose fault is it? I am quite ready to be charmed, but I shall not make-believe I am charmed.

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
Ready
Proudly
Shall
Charmed
Quite
Invariably
Reading
Fault
Read
Author
Believe
Faults
Make
Whose
Duty

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The kitchen clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnæan classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Never lose an opportunity to see anything that is beautiful. It is God's handwriting a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The simplest words,--we do not know what they mean except when we love and aspire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The world globes itself in a drop of dew.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The age of puberty is a crisis in the age of man worth studying. It is the passage from the unconscious to the conscious from thesleep of passions to their rage.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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
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When the man is at home, his standing in society is well known and quietly taken but when he is abroad, it is problematical, and is dependent on the success of his manners.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He is only rich who owns the day. There is no king, rich man, fairy, or demon who possesses such power as that.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We cannot forgive another for not being ourselves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Health is the first muse, comprising the magical benefits of air, landscape, and bodily exercise on the mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The task ahead of us is never as great as the power behind us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Science in England, in America, is jealous of theory, hates the name of love and moral purpose. There's revenge for this humanity.What manner of man does science make? The boy is not attracted. He says, I do not wish to be such a kind of man as my professor is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The charm of fine manners is music and sculpture and picture to many who do not pretend to appreciation of these arts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Mankind divides itself into two classes,--benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast the first a handful.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Self-love is, in almost all men, such an over-weight that they are incredulous of a man's habitual preference of the general good to his own but when they see it proved by sacrifices of ease, wealth, rank, and of life itself, there is no limit to their admiration.
Ralph Waldo Emerson