Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes About Poverty
-
Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are. It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the very rich, in a true scale would be found very indigent and ragged.
→ -
I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.
→ -
Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.
→ -
Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.
→ -
A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty, as of a displaced and unfurnished member. He is to be dressed in arts and institutions, as well as in body garments. Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must; but coop up most men and you undo them.
→ -
The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear, alike in the poverty of the obscurest farm, and in the miscellany of metropolitan life, and that these few are alone to be regarded,--the escape from all false ties; courage to be what we are; and love what is simple and beautiful; independence and cheerful relation, these are the essentials,--these, and the wish to serve,--to add somewhat to the well-being of men.
→ -
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.
→ -
The greatest man in history was the poorest.
→ -
Poverty demoralizes. A man in debt is so far a slave; and Wall-street thinks it easy for a millionaire to be a man of his word, aman of honor, but, that, in failing circumstances, no man can be relied on to keep his integrity.
→ -
Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture.
→ -
Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong
→ -
Poverty consist in feeling poor.
→ -
The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, andthe country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,--travel a whole day together,--looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor.
→ -
This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.
→ -
The poor are only they who feel poor.
→ -
The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.
→
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