Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes About Genius
-
The value of a dollar is to buy just things; a dollar goes on increasing in value with all the genius and all the virtue of the world. A dollar in a university is worth more than a dollar in a jail; in a temperate, schooled, law-abiding community than in some sink of crime, where dice, knives, and arsenic are in constant play.
→ -
The charm of the best courages is that they are inventions, inspirations, flashes of genius.
→ -
It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree.
→ -
The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.
→ -
Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair-all these we never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote from them. What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things; wise and foolish have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. It bears the name of Goethe.
→ -
A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.
→ -
Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!-it seems to say,-there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.
→ -
The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.
→ -
I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, - that is genius.
→ -
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men that is genius.
→ -
The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.
→ -
Some men at the approach of a dispute neigh like horses. Unless there be an argument, they think nothing is doing. Some talkers excel in the precision with which they formulate their thoughts, so that you get from them somewhat to remember; others lay criticism asleep by a charm. Especially women use words that are not words,--as steps in a dance are not steps,--but reproduce the genius of that they speak of; as the sound of some bells makes us think of the bell merely, whilst the church chimes in the distance bring the church and its serious memories before us.
→ -
Genius always finds itself a century too early.
→ -
We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, andfind a new and fervent sense; as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say, "the italics are ours.
→ -
The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers' hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness.
→ -
We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.
→ -
Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men together again after ten years, and if the presence of some penetrating and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confession of insanities would come up!
→ -
Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective store?
→ -
I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope that it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.
→ -
Accept your genius and say what you think.
→ -
Genius Borrows nobly.
→ -
Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show.
→ -
The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely, and not by the direct stroke: men of genius, but not yetaccredited: one gets the cheer of their light, without paying too great a tax.
→ -
Every young man is prone to be misled by the suggestions of his own ill-founded ambition which he mistakes for the promptings of asecret genius, and thence dreams of unrivaled greatness.
→ -
If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.
→ -
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
→ -
Europe has always owed to oriental genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable and true.
→ -
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men - that is genius... Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist... What I must do, is all that concerns me; not what the people think... Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing, but the triumph of principles.
→ -
The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.
→ -
Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.
→
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