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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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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
Good
Conversation
Await
World
Courage
Tumult
Term
Complacency
Suffering
Finite
Natural
Envy
Nature
Curious
Doe
Suffer
Sometimes
Brave
Speedy

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A man of no conversation should smoke.
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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.
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In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.
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Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings.
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Power and speed be hands and feet.
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We do not yet trust the unknown power of thoughts.
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Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish,--and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial they are notequal to the work they pretend. They lose their way in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit.
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We live in succession, in division, in parts and particles. Meantime, within man, is the soul of the whole the wise silence the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related the eternal One.
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Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.
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He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
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The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.
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An expense of ends to means is fateMorganization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits.
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Sentimentalists ... adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel.... Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?
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The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.
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It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no person can sincerely try to help another without helping him or herself. Serve and you shall be served. If you love and serve people, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape the remuneration.
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'Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.
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The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown him. He snaps his fingers at laws and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.
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We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.
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The mass are animal, in pupilage, and near chimpanzee.
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No facts to me are sacred none are profane.
Ralph Waldo Emerson