Quote

Thus grows up fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.

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
Vain
Fantastic
Equivocal
Thus
Semblance
Frivolous
Fashion
Feared
Violence
Morals
Grows
Assault
Moral
Followed

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image
The desire of gold is not for gold. It is not the love of much wheat, and wool and household stuff. It is the means of freedom and benefit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Natural religion supplies still all the facts which are disguised under the dogma of popular creeds. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda-these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Our age is very cheap and intelligible. Unroof any house, and you shall find it. The well-being consists in having a sufficiency of coffee and toast, with a daily newspaper a well glazed parlor, with marbles, mirrors and centre-table and the excitement of a few parties and a few rides in a year.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take a single step that would bring them there.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none. If there is grandeur in you, you will find grandeur in porters and sweeps.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock should find the time in my face.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Your actions speak so loud, I can't hear what you say.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I'm not afraid of falling into my inkpot.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something he has been put on his wits, on his manhood he has gained facts learns his ignorance is cured of the insanity of conceit has got moderation and real skill.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
It is sublime to think and say of another, I need never meet, or speak, or write to him: we need not reinforce ourselves, or send tokens of remembrance I rely on him as on myself: if he did thus and thus, I know it was right.
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 seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The history of reform is always identical it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.
Ralph Waldo Emerson