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We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man, man.

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
Food
Fire
Men
Sympathy
Higher

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.
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Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere as to expect poetry from this engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.
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We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors.
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And what is Genius but finer love, a love impersonal, a love of the flower and perfection of things, and a desire to draw a new picture or copy of the same? It looks to the cause and life: it proceeds from within outward, whilst Talent goes from without inward.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile either on persons, or opinions, or possessions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I suppose you could never explain to the most ingenous molusk that such a creature as a whale existed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned much is to say on both sides,and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line.
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Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The river knows the way to the sea: Without a pilot it runs and falls, Blessing all lands with its charity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain. The mind does not create what it perceives, anymore than the eye creates the rose.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Some men love only to talk where they are masters. They like to go to school-girls, or to boys, or into the shops where the sauntering people gladly lend an ear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life is a series of surprises.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture and leave nothing but pure power.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A day is a miniature eternity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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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The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson