Ralph Waldo Emerson Use Quotations

Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

We are adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends: and in nature is no end; but every thing, at the end of one use, is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial natures.

Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use the tools, they use you. All tools are in one sense edge-tools, and dangerous.

Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate. The right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature.

The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversation; and this is a main function of life.

All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, trebleor centuple use and meaning.

The exercise of all the senses is as intense pleasure, as anyone will find, who recovers the use of one after being deprived of it.

The peace of the man who has forsworn the use of the bullet seems to me not quite peace, but a canting impotence.

We have more than we use.

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour?

The greatest homage to truth is to use it.

Man was born to be rich, or to inevitably grow rich, by the use of his faculties: by the union of thought with nature.

The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.

Of all wit's uses, the main one is to live well with who has none.

The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure.

A weed is a plant we've found no use for yet.

The divine gift is ever the instant life, which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for recomposition.

Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.

Spartans, stoics, heroes, saints and gods use short and positive speech.

A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.

The sciences, even the best,-mathematics and astronomy,-are like sportsmen, who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any use of it.

Thought makes everything fit for use.

The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it....we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.

Knowledge is the antidote to fear,- Knowledge, Use and Reason, with its higher aids.

The days come and go but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use...In God, every end is converted into a new means.

We forget ourselves and our destinies in health, and the chief use of temporary sickness is to remind us of these concerns.