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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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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
Reading
Scholar
Read
Idle
Times
Directly
Book
Precious
Must
Instruments
Men
Hour
Readings
Thinking
Books
Subdued
Hours
Wasted

More quotes by 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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The value of a dollar is to buy just things a dollar goes on increasing in value with all the genius and all the virtue of the world. A dollar in a university is worth more than a dollar in a jail in a temperate, schooled, law-abiding community than in some sink of crime, where dice, knives, and arsenic are in constant play.
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We cannot let our angels go we do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in.
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Nature forever puts a premium on reality. What is done for effect is seen to be done for effect what is done for love is felt to be done for love. A man inspires affection and honor because he was not lying in wait for these.
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An empire is an immense egotism.
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The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The have a good friend is one of the greatest delights of life.
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My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world I ask, When shall I die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeinga Universe which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The terrible tabulation of the French statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, then, in every twenty thousand, or thirty thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or marries his grandmother.
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Let a man behave in his own house as a guest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we know the particular thing, and every thing, and every man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We call the beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good and the heartlessness of the true.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history isto be read and written.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If we walk in the woods, we must feed mosquitoes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I am the owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year, of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain, Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Henceforth, please God, forever I forego the yolk of men's opinions. I will be light-hearted as a bird and live with God. I find him in the bottom of my heart, and I hear continually his voice therein.
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To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy is to set your own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances instead of being conditioned by them.
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Great men exist that there might be greater men.
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An English family consists of a few persons, who, from youth to age, are found revolving within a few feet of each other, as if tied by some invisible ligature, tense as that cartilage which we have seen attaching the two Siamese.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life is a search after power and this is an element with which the world is so saturated,-there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged,-that no honest seeking goes unrewarded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson