26
Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote,--justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility.
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43 quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson · clear filters
27
Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.
28
The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.
29
A mind might ponder its thought for ages and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day.
30
Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments; each of its joys ripens into a new want.
31
Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so only it have the countenance of the beloved object.
32
The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.
33
Their once flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and losing in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good understanding.
34
Though slowly and with pain, the objects of the affections change, as the objects of thought do.
35
Thus even love, which is the deification of persons, must become more impersonal every day.
36
A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best
37
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
38
The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
39
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide
40
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist
41
Society we must have; but let it be society, and not exchanging news, or eating from the same dish.
42
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines
43
I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emersonmisattributed·Wind-Wafted Wild Flowers, by Muriel Strode, in The Open Court, Volume XVII, Number 567·August 1903
Wrongly attributed
Universally attributed to Emerson, and it is in none of his essays, journals or letters. It is Muriel Strode, an American writer almost nobody has heard of, in the August 1903 issue of The Open Court. The rewriting is the interesting part: Strode wrote a vow in the first person about herself, and the version that circulates has been turned into an instruction issued to somebody else. Do not go where the path may lead is not what she said. I will not follow is.