Ralph Waldo Emerson
459 quotations
Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.
Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.
The basis of good manners is self-reliance.
The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.
The masses have no habit of self reliance or original action.
Men are what their mothers made them.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.
Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.
My chief want in life is someone who shall make me do what I can.
We cannot see things that stare us in the face until the hour comes that the mind is ripened.
Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.
All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.
The world is his who has money to go over it.
Money often costs too much.
The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.
If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.
Music causes us to think eloquently.
I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.
A man is related to all nature.
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.
Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of hidden stuff.
In nature nothing can be given. All things are sold.
The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.
We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.