26
The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.
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43 quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson · clear filters
27
Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments; each of its joys ripens into a new want.
28
We say so because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it.
29
Thus even love, which is the deification of persons, must become more impersonal every day.
30
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.
31
Though slowly and with pain, the objects of the affections change, as the objects of thought do.
32
Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.
33
Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.
34
A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope of the heart.
35
All the toys that infatuate men, and which they play for
36
The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it, and not according to the work or the place.
37
A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.
38
Society we must have; but let it be society, and not exchanging news, or eating from the same dish.
39
One protects himself by solitude, and one by courtesy, and one by an acid, worldly manner,--each concealing how he can the thinness of his skin and his incapacity for strict association.
40
Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote,--justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility.
41
The first and last lesson of the useful arts is, that Nature tyrannizes over our works.
42
To accomplish anything excellent, the will must work for catholic and universal ends.
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.