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Only those books come down which deserve to last . All the gilt edges, vellum and morocco, all the presentation copies to all the libraries will not preserve a book in circulation beyond its intrinsic date.

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
Lasts
Preserve
Last
Preserves
Gilt
Book
Date
Morocco
Come
Edges
Intrinsic
Library
Circulation
Deserve
Libraries
Beyond
Presentation
Books
Copies

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Don't set out to teach theism from your natural history... You spoil both.
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Convert life into truth.
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Philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery.
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If we walk in the woods, we must feed mosquitoes.
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Every great man is unique.
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Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the way of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired.
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The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism.
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The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect.
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What you persist in doing gets easier. The task hasn't changed, but your ability to do it has increased.
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The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every reform was once a private opinion.
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Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to a deed.
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Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate.
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I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The world exists for the education of each man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Life loiters at the book's first page,-- Ah! could we turn the leaf.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Who does not sometimes envy the good and the brave, who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await with curious complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with finite nature?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson