The most active lives have so much routine as to preclude progress almost equally with the most inactive. Ralph Waldo Emerson More Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson More Quotes From Ralph Waldo Emerson Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms. Ralph Waldo Emerson fantastic faith men The religion which is to guide and fulfill the present and coming ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The scientific mind must have a faith which is science. Ralph Waldo Emerson intellectual faith mind Great conversation ... requires an absolute running of two souls into one. Ralph Waldo Emerson soul running two It is commonly said by farmers, that a good pear or apple costs no more time or pains to rear, than a poor one; so I would have no work of art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the best. Ralph Waldo Emerson apples pain art Steam was till the other day the devil which we dreaded. Every pot made by any human potter or brazier had a hole in its cover, to let off the enemy, lest he should lift pot and roof and carry the house away. Ralph Waldo Emerson devil house enemy A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands. Ralph Waldo Emerson men philosophy hands A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light. Ralph Waldo Emerson light desire men Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!-it seems to say,-there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power. Ralph Waldo Emerson romance justice heart The height, the deity of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude. Ralph Waldo Emerson solitude self men An expense of ends to means is fate;Morganization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits. Ralph Waldo Emerson character mean book So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe. Ralph Waldo Emerson soul believe facts I knew a witty physician who found theology in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was a disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian. Ralph Waldo Emerson disease witty men 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 lessons criticism thinking I find it more credible, since it is anterior information, that one man should know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many men should know the world. Ralph Waldo Emerson chinese men heaven A right rule for a club would be,-Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic. Ralph Waldo Emerson clubs would-be men The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion. Ralph Waldo Emerson personal-qualities giving war I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Ralph Waldo Emerson evanescence fingers hardest Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises. 'Tis the vulgar great who come dizened with gold and jewels. Real kings hide away their crowns in their wardrobes, and affect a plain and poor exterior. Ralph Waldo Emerson real jewels kings 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 ugly differences age Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant-and this commonly on the ground of other reading and hearing-that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent. Ralph Waldo Emerson reading mind two
