Quote

What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed.

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
Idea
Counts
Ideas
Miracles
Done
Miracle
Never
Infinite
Men
Short
Love
Genius
Degrades
Poor
Executed
Hope
Degrade

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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What is originality? It is being one's self, and reporting accurately what we see and are.
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It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in.
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I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction.
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I consider theology to be the rhetoric of morals.
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Society does not love its unmaskers.
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Every thing admonishes us how needlessly long life is.
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People are timid and apologetic they are no longer upright they dare not say I think, I am, but quote some saint or sage. They are ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones they are for what they are they exist with God to-day.
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Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
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Thought is the seed of action but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.
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Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.
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Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.
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Rude poets of the tavern hearth, squandering your unquoted mirth, which keeps the ground, and never soars, while jake retorts, and reuben roars tough and screaming, as birch-bark, goes like bullet to its mark while the solid curse and jeer never balk the waiting ear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we callFate.
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Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.
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The clergyman who lives in the city may have piety, but he must have taste.
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It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.
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A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.
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We can only obey our own polarity.
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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?
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Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.
Ralph Waldo Emerson