Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes About Ethics
-
The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.
→ -
Self-trust is the first secret of success.
→ -
How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is.
→ -
How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment.
→ -
Let every man shovel out his own snow and the whole city will be passable.
→ -
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
→ -
Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not.
→ -
Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances.
→ -
The highest compact we can make with our fellow is - "Let there be truth between us two forevermore."
→ -
Men are respectable only as they respect.
→ -
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
→ -
The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus, "the whole is greater than its part;" "reaction is equal to action;" "the smallest weight may be made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated by time;" and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as well as physical sense. These propositions have a much more extensive and universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined to technical use.
→ -
Our distrust is very expensive.
→ -
The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.
→ -
Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or town. The broad ethics of Jesus were quickly narrowed to village theologies, which preach an election or favoritism.
→ -
You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
→ -
Do not believe that possibly you can escape the reward of your action.
→ -
Be silly. Be honest. Be kind.
→
Related Authors
-
James F. Cooper Writer -
Robert Frost Poet -
Thomas Carlyle Philosopher -
John Muir Author -
Friedrich Nietzsche Philologist -
Louisa May Alcott Novelist -
Edgar Allan Poe Author -
Herman Melville Novelist -
William Wordsworth Poet -
Washington Irving Author -
Helen Keller Author -
Margaret Fuller Journalist -
Elizabeth Cady Stanton Activist -
William Lloyd Garrison Journalist -
Walt Whitman Poet -
Henry David Thoreau Author -
William James Philosopher -
Emily Dickinson Poet -
Ralph Ellison Novelist -
Nathaniel Hawthorne Novelist