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It never was in the power of any man or any community to call the arts into being. They come to serve his actual wants, never to please his fancy.
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
Men
Wants
Call
Community
Actual
Artist
Fancy
Art
Arts
Power
Serve
Come
Creativity
Never
Please
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, andfind a new and fervent sense as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say, the italics are ours.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beware of jokes from which we go away hollow and ashamed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is it not better to intimate our astonishment as we pass through this world if it be only for a moment ere we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss? I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men are lenses through which we read our own minds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no calamity that right words will not begin to redress
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The pest of society is egotists.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Oversoul is before Time, and Time, Father of all else, is one of his children.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
...man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the center of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a dog is chasing after you, whistle for him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
