Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life.

Man is the will, and woman the sentiment. In this ship of humanity, Will is the rudder, and Sentiment the sail; when woman affects to steer, the rudder is only a masked sail.

We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history.

Of all debts, men are least willing to pay their taxes; what a satire this is on government.

Not gold, but only man can make a people great and strong; men who, for truth and honor's sake, stand fast and suffer long.

Pines a thousand years old. Every year they must go farther for them: they recede, like beavers and Indians, before the white man.

Man's life is a progress, not a station.

You have a place to live in this world which no other man can occupy; hence no competitors.

Wherever a man commits a crime, God finds a witness. Every secret crime has its reporter.

Men are so charmed with valor that they have pleased themselves with being called lions, leopards, eagles and dragons, from the animals contemporary with us in the geologic formations.

In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men.

Any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage.

Every man who would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground.

A man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would not have them rule him.

Fear is cruel and mean. The political reigns of terror have been reigns of madness and malignity,--a total perversion of opinion;society is upside down, and its best men are thought too bad to live.

Things have their laws as well as men, and things refuse to be trifled with.

So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self.

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.

When a man becomes cultivated, he develops a new respect for who he is. This causes him to be ashamed of his past identification of himself and others according to things, i.e. property.

If a man sits down to think, he is immediately asked if he has a headache.

But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.