Quote

I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.

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
Great
Ugly
Court
Youth
Difference
Differences
Disparity
Age
Courts
Whether
Fatal
Find
Muse

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All diseases run into one, old age.
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We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.
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We are imprisoned in life in the company of persons powerfully unlike us.
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Whom God has put asunder, why should man put together?
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Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem the shepherd, his lamb the farmer, corn the miner, a stone the painter, his picture the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing.
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Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.
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Do not be caught by the sensational in nature, as a coarse red-faced sunset, a garrulous waterfall, or a fifteen thousand foot mountain... avoid prettiness - the word looks much like pettiness - and there is but little difference between them.
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Let not the tie be mercenary, though the service is measured in money. Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.
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What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects.
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An orator or author is never successful till he has learned to make his words smaller than his ideas.
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Headwinds are sore vexations and the more passengers the sorer.
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When it is dark enough, men see the stars.
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A great mind is a good sailor, as a great heart is.
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Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
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Why should all virtue work in one and the same way? Why should all give dollars? It is very inconvenient to us country folk, and we do not think any good will come of it. We have not dollars merchants have let them give them. Farmers will give corn poets will sing women will sew laborers will lend a hand the children will bring flowers.
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The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He stands close to Nature he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes to be.
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As we are, so we do and as we do, so is it done to us we are the builders of our fortunes.
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A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
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In the actual world--the painful kingdom of time and place--dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy.
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He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture and leave nothing but pure power.
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