Quote

Our age is very cheap and intelligible. Unroof any house, and you shall find it. The well-being consists in having a sufficiency of coffee and toast, with a daily newspaper a well glazed parlor, with marbles, mirrors and centre-table and the excitement of a few parties and a few rides in a year.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
House
Tables
Newspaper
Marbles
Find
Mirrors
Centre
Intelligible
Wells
Coffee
Cheap
Rides
Well
Daily
Consists
Parlor
Years
Shall
Parties
Toast
Year
Excitement
Toasts
Party
Table
Sufficiency
Age
Newspapers
Marble
Glazed

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image
The greatest homage to truth is to use it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Life is an ecstasy. Life is sweet as nitrous oxide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other matters [science] at other ends of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Books are the best of things, well used abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
If the race is good, so is the place.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Our distrust is very expensive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Now every one must do after his kind, be he asp or angel, and these must.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
In the moment when you make the least petition to God, though it be but a silent wish that he may approve you, or add one moment to your life,--do you not, in the very act, necessarily exclude all other beings from your thought? In that act, the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your mind than your brother or your child.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
It is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, or ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom--in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unraveled, nor shown.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
If we could have any security against moods! If the profoundest prophet could be holden to his words, and the hearer who is readyto sell all and join the crusade, could have any certificate that to-morrow his prophet shall not unsay his testimony!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The gates of thought, - how slow and late they discover themselves! Yet when they appear, we see that they were always there, always open.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Poets should be law-givers that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead the civil code, and the day's work.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
But harder still it has proved to resist and rule the dragon Money, with his paper wings. Chancellors and Boards of Trade, Pitt, Peel, and Bobinson, and their parliaments, and their whole generation, adopted false principles, and went to their graves in the belief that they were enriching the country which they were impoverishing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson