Ralph Waldo Emerson
Birthdate: May 25, 1803
Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Date of Death: April 27, 1882
Occupation: Author, Essayist, Lecturer, Pastor, Philosopher, and Poet
Profile: Educated at Harvard. A leader of the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.
Website: http://www.rwe.org/
Number of Quotes: 23
A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and
philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
All diseases run into one, old age.
All mankind love a lover.
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
Character is higher than intellect ... A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.
Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.
In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.
Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
Men are what their mothers made them.
Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in
parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one.
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Sincerity is the highest compliment you can pay.
The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
We as for long life, but 'tis deep life, or noble moments that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.
What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.
Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
Last on Earth
