“Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity. Parnassus (1874) Preface”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
10 quotes
“A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster”
“Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever. From a lecture on Books given in the Fraternity Course in Boston in 1864; the quoted phrase 'glittering generalities' had been used by Rufus Choate to describe the declaration of the rights of man in the Preamble to the Constitution”
“The clergy are as like as peas. "The Preacher", in The Index: A Weekly Paper (Feb. 5, 1880) pp. 62”
“Always put the best interpretation on a tenet. Why not on Christianity, wholesome, sweet, and poetic? It is the record of a pure and holy soul, humble, absolutely disinterested, a trutn”
“If the colleges were better, if they ... had the power of imparting valuable thought, creative principles, truths which become powers, thoughts which become talents,”
“God may consent, but not forever.”
“Walter Savage Landor”
“I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders. Letter to Thomas Carlyle”
“He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses. The Method of Nature (1841), p. 25”