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But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism.

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
Thought
Dialectics
Enough
Pedantry
Think
Futility
Thinking
Criticism
Life
Lessons
Help
Times
Helping

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The great will not condescend to take anything seriously.
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A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants.
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The experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet
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Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.
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We don't grow old. When we cease to grow, we become old.
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That which we call character is a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a familiar or genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart.
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I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?
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Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
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Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.
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Out from the heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old.
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The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery?
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Though thou loved her as thyself, As a self of purer clay, Tho' her parting dims the day, Stealing grace from all alive, Heartily know, When half-gods go, The gods arrive.
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Men do not believe in the power of education. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We renounce all high aims.
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I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.
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There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome alwayswe are invited to work.
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So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth whispers, 'I can.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Ethics and religion differ herein that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God Ethics does not.
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The secret in education lies in respecting the student.
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A mob is a society obodies, voluntarily bereaving themselves oreason, and traversing its work. The mob is man, voluntarily descending to the nature othe beast. Its fit hour oactivity is night its actions are insane, like its whole constitution.
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The wings of Time are black and white, Pied with morning and with night.
Ralph Waldo Emerson