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

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

More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image
A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Genius is the power to labor better and more availably. Deserve thy genius: exalt it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Two sorts of writers possess genius: those who think, and those who cause others to think.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends her all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
We judge of man's wisdom by his hope.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Great country, diminutive minds. America is formless, has no terrible and no beautiful condensation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Liberty is slow fruit. It is never cheap it is made difficult because freedom is the accomplishment and perfectness of man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The best political economy is the care and culture of men for, in these crises, all are ruined except such as are proper individuals, capable of thought, and of new choice and the application of their talent to new labor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us in other words, to engage us to obey.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
It never was in the power of any man or any community to call the arts into being. They come to serve his actual wants, never to please his fancy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Every man I meet is in some way my superior...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,--what ample borrowers of eternity they are!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Image
I like my boy with his endless sweet soliloquies and iterations and his utter inability to conceive why I should not leave all my nonsense, business, and writing and come to tie up his toy horse, as if there was or could be any end to nature beyond his horse. And he is wiser than we when [he] threatens his whole threat I will not love you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson