Ralph Waldo Emerson Doe Quotations

Economy does not consist in saving the coal, but in using the time while it burns.

He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted.

It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in.

The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral.

There is no one who does not exaggerate!

Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.

He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession', for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.

Society, to be sure, does not like this very well; it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declares all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will retaliate.

The soul is not born; it does not die; it was not produced from anyone… Unborn, eternal, it is not slain, though the body is slain.

The public values the invention more than the inventor does. The inventor knows there is much more and better where this came from.

If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.

I think the vice of our housekeeping is that it does not hold man sacred. The vice of government, the vice of education, the viceof religion, is one with that of the private life.

Necessity does everything well. In our condition of universal dependence, it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, and to give all that is asked, though at great inconvenience.

Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to- morrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them.

Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions. Society does not love its unmaskers.

Society does not love its unmaskers.

The universal does not attract us until housed in an individual.

The mind will quote whether the tongue does or not.

But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.

A farm is a good thing, when it begins and ends with itself, and does not need a salary, or a shop, to eke it out.

But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.

Necessity does everything well.

All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal.

Circumstance does not make the man. Circumstance reveals man to himself.

Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate.

The good rain, like a bad preacher, does not know when to leave off.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.

The life of labor does not make men, but drudges.

The universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest.

When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him.

A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engraffed with a foreign stock.

God evidently does not intend us all to be rich, or powerful or great, but He does intend us all to be friends.

It does not to dwell on dreams and forget to live, but it is equally foolish to ignore the past – never forget.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.

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.

There is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,-must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know.