Book detail: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated) is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
The Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated) is a meticulously compiled and beautifully illustrated volume that brings together the extensive literary output of Ralph Waldo Emerson. This collection encompasses his essays, lectures, and poetry, showcasing his profound impact on American literature and philosophy. The inclusion of illustrations adds a visual dimension to the text, enhancing the reader's experience of Emerson's work.
The quotes below use the same card format as the rest of the site, including topics, source notes, copy actions, image creation, and sharing controls.
Read more
“I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to go to church no more.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“The kitchen clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnæan classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“The music that can deepest reach and cure all ill is cordial speech.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“When I go into the garden with a spade and dig a bed I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Today is a king in disguise.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“My angel,-his name is Freedom,-
Choose him to be your king;
He shall cut pathways east and west,
And fend you with his wing.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Not in his goals but in his transitions, man is great.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Life is our dictionary.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“The education of the will is the object of our existence.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“The greatest man in history was the poorest.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can walk but after the counsel of his own bosom.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Nature forever puts a premium on reality. What is done for effect is seen to be done for effect; what is done for love is felt to be done for love. A man inspires affection and honor because he was not lying in wait for these.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of life.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“The populace drags down the gods to their own level.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or a mollusk, and isolated it-which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“We have more than we use.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One's enough.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)