This surface on which we now stand is .. Ralph Waldo Emerson

This surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Profession: Poet
Nationality: American

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The practical common-sense of modern society, the utilitarian direction which labor, laws, opinion, religion, take, is the natural genius of the British mind.

If you cannot be free be as free as you can.

The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

Pay every debt, as if God wrote the bill.

Miss Austen's novels … seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer … is marriageableness.

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk to much.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

The wise man through an excess of wisdom is made a fool.

Life is a progress and not a station.

We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.

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