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The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations

Book by Ralph Waldo Emerson · 13 quotes · Men, Way, Ifs

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The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations Quotes

“You must elect your work; you shall take what your brains can, and drop all the rest. Only so can that amount of vital force accumulate which can make the step from knowing to doing. No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken. It is a step out of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness.”

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Book:The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations
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“Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.”

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Book:The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations
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“We have feudal governments in a commercial age. It would be but an easy extension of our commercial system, to pay a private emperor a fee for services, as we pay an architect, an engineer, or a lawyer. If any man has talent for righting wrong, for administering difficult affairs, for counselling poor farmers how to turn their estates to good husbandry, for combining a hundred private enterprises to a general benefit, let him in the county- town, or in Court-street, put up his sign-board, Mr. Smith, Governor, Mr. Johnson, Working king.”

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Book:The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations
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“The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritualcreation, and not in augmenting animal existence. Nor is the man enriched, in repeating the old experiments of animal sensation; nor unless through new powers and ascending pleasures he knows himself by the actual experience of higher good to be already on the way to the highest.”

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Book:The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations
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“A man is the prisoner of his power. A topical memory makes him an almanac; a talent for debate, disputant; skill to get money makes him a miser, that is, a beggar. Culture reduces these inflammations by invoking the aid of other powers against the dominant talent, and by appealing to the rank of powers. It watches success.”

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Book:The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations
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“A garden has this advantage, that it makes it indifferent where you live. A well-laid garden makes the face of the country of no account; let that be low or high, grand or mean, you have made a beautiful abode worthy of man.”

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“The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.”

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“A garden is like those pernicious machineries which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg , and his whole body to irresistible destruction.”

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“Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.”

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