Quotes By Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

“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.”

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”

“The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.”

“The years teach much the days never know.”

“The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.”

“Me too thy nobleness has taughtTo master my despair;The fountains of my hidden lifeAre through thy friendship fair.”

“The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.”

“There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.”

“All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.”

“Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams”

“Language is fossil Poetry.”

“The South-wind bringsLife, sunshine and desire,And on every mount and meadowBreathes aromatic fire;But over the dead he has no power,The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;And, looking over the hills, I mournThe darling who shall not return.”

“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 poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.”

“His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong”