Quote

For splendor, there must somewhere be rigid economy. That the head of the house may go brave, the members must be plainly clad, and the town must save that the State may spend.

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
Government
Taxes
Plainly
May
Members
Rigid
Must
Spend
Splendor
Economy
Town
Head
Towns
State
Somewhere
House
Brave
States
Save
Clad

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Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus.
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it in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower.
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Man was born to be rich, or to inevitably grow rich, by the use of his faculties: by the union of thought with nature.
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The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive.
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We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.
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I think all men know better than they do know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles but they darenot trust their presentiments.
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Invention breeds invention.
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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 perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.
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It is curious that Christianity, which is idealism, is sturdily defended by the brokers, and steadily attacked by the idealists.
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A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation.
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If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines but meet on what common ground remains,--if onlythat the sun shines, and the rain rains for both the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it the boundary mountains, on which the eye had fastened, have melted into air.
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