Quote

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

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
Huge
Student
Incalculable
White
Rough
Benefactors
Use
Dress
Mixed
Ends
Wild
Terrific
Trying
Dresses
Shirt
Road
Divinity
Clean
Providence
Whitewash
Students
Shirts
Benefactor

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image
The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact thatall nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The terrors of the child are quite reasonable, and add to his loveliness for his utter ignorance and weakness, and his enchanting indignation on such a small basis of capital compel every bystander to take his part.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Consideration is the soil in which wisdom may be expected to grow, and strength be given to every up-springing plant of duty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
It is a greater joy to see the author's author, than himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore it if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines but meet on what common ground remains,--if onlythat the sun shines, and the rain rains for both the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it the boundary mountains, on which the eye had fastened, have melted into air.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
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
Image
Life loiters at the book's first page,-- Ah! could we turn the leaf.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
That which builds is better than that which is built.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
From Washington, proverbially the city of distances, through all its cities, states, and territories, it is a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Man sheds grief as his skin sheds rain.
Ralph Waldo Emerson