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When we attempt to define and describe God, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages.

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
Define
Attempt
Desert
God
Fool
Savages
Language
Helpless
Thought
Fools
Describe

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The doctrine of Necessity or Destiny is the doctrine of Toleration.
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The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it.
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We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.
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No matter how often defeated, you are born to victory.
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Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.
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The public values the invention more than the inventor does. The inventor knows there is much more and better where this came from.
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The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels.
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Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
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Men are better than this theology.
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People who wash much have a high mind about it, and talk down to those who wash little.
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Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread.
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Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know.
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The love of novels is the preference of sentiment to the senses.
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Every thing admonishes us how needlessly long life is.
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Cultivate an attitude of gratitude, of giving and forgiving. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
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Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to love the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love Him was happiness--to love Him in others' virtues.
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The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advancesto his own music, alike in frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness.
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Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.
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There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:-never enough to pay for an edition of his works yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them written in his hand.
Ralph Waldo Emerson