Emerson Quotes

“It has always been my understanding that truth and freedom can only exist in wild places.”
― Daniel J. Rice, This Side of a Wilderness

“You’re scared,” he said quietly.
“Scared?” I scoffed. “Of what?”
“Of anything real. And what we have is real. You love me and it terrifies you.”
“I don’t love you,” I lied.
He grabbed my face then, dragging me closer with both hands. “You love me. I know you do. I know it because I can see it in your eyes . . . in the way you look at me.” He inhaled. “It’s the same way I look at you.”
― Sophie Jordan, Tease

“Mr. Emerson watched, almost breathless, as she swirled the wine in her glass expertly, then lifted it so that she could examine it more closely in the candlelight. She brought the glass to her nose, closed her eyes, and sniffed. Then she placed the glass to her plump lips and tasted the wine, holding it in her mouth for a while before swallowing. She opened her eyes, smiled even more widely, and thanked Antonio for his precious gift.”
― Sylvain Reynard, Gabriel's Inferno

“How come no one understood me, and more importantly, how come I was starting to not understand myself?”
― Kimberly Lauren, Beautiful Broken Rules

“Emerson has what I believe is called a selective memory. He can recall minute details of particular excavations but is likely to forget where he left his hat.”
― Elizabeth Peters, A River in the Sky

“Enmerson's interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a verb (as Mary Daly insists), poetry is the act of creating. The process of poetry also mimics the process of nature. 'This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change.' Another aspect of nature is genius, which, as Emerson observes, 'is the activity which repairs the decays of things.”
― Robert D. Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process

“[Emerson] had a gift of the picturesque phrase, but too often it is empty of meaning. He is a nimble skater who cuts elegant and complicated figures on a surface of frozen platitudes. Perhaps he would have been a better writer if he had not been quite so good a man.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

“The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (With Notes)(Biography)

“Among those who could read, books were prized possessions. Words on paper were powerful magic, seductive as music, sharp as a knife at times, or gentle as a kiss. Friendships and love affairs blossomed as men and women read to each other in summer meadows and winter kitchens. Pages were ambrosia in their hands. A new novel or collection of poems was something everybody talked about. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Bronte, Austen, Dickens, Keats, Emerson, Cooper, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Twain. To read these authors was to go on a grand adventure and see things as you never had before, see yourself as you never had before.”
― Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How A Visionary And The Glaciers Of Alaska Changed America

“Why is a man with a knife after your blood? Who sent him? I would like to write the fellow a letter of thanks!”
― Elizabeth Peters, A River in the Sky

“{McCabe on the influential scientist Luther Burbank}

His magnificent work, which added an incalculable sum to the wealth of America and left him a comparatively poor man, is well known. His own simple account of his discoveries runs to 12 volumes and is incomplete. I was one of the few men whom he admitted to his house in Santa Rosa in the few months before he died and I found him advanced even beyond the vague Emersonian theism of his earlier years. He agreed to see me, he said, though he was tired and ill, because of his admiration of my work as a rationalist. He had just raised a storm by a public declaration that he did not believe in a future life, and his biographer Wilbur Hale repeats this.”
― Joseph McCabe, A Biographical Dictionary of Ancient Medieval and Modern Freethinkers

“The first sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s that reached me still jolts me every time I run into it. “Meek young men,” he wrote in “The American Scholar,” “grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books…”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process

“I carry the dust of a journey, That cannot be shaken away. It lives deep within me, For I breathe it every day.”
― Greg Lake

“I have heard stories from the depths of human lives where men and women were wrestling with the elemental problems of misery and sin--stories that put upon a man's heart a burden of vicarious sorrow, even though he does but listen to them. Here was real human need crying out after the living God revealed in Christ. Consider all the multitudes of men who so need God, and then think of Christian churches making of themselves a cockpit of controversy when there is not a single thing at stake in the business. So much of it does not matter! And there is one thing that does matter--more than anything else in all the world--that men in their personal lives and in their social relationships should know Jesus Christ.”
― Harry Emerson Fosdick, Shall the Fundamentalists Win?: Or The New Knowledge and the Christian Faith

“Yet however much he read, there were whole categories of books the mature Emerson would not read. He would not read theology or academic controversy. He wanted original accounts, first-hand experience, personal witness. He would read your poem or your novel, but not your opinion of someone else’s poem or novel, let alone your opinion of someone else’s opinion…”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process

“Let’s go. I don’t want to keep you from the things you have to do . . . like plan the next crime wave with your biker gang.”
“Sure. And you don’t want to miss your nail appointment.”
I cocked my head. “That’s tomorrow.”
― Sophie Jordan, Tease

“My world view is somewhat unique. I have learned from many great philosophers including Plato, Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, Darwin, Tagore, Emerson, and many more.”
― Debasish Mridha

“Life," said Emerson, "consists in what a man is thinking all day." If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine. I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at night.
But I don’t ask to go back to America, to be put in a double harness again, to work the treadmill. No, I prefer to be a poor man of Europe. God knows, I am poor enough; it only remains to be a man.”
― Henry Miller

“Life," said Emerson, "consists in what a man is thinking all day." If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine. I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at night.
But I don’t ask to go back to America, to be put in a double harness again, to work the treadmill. No, I prefer to be a poor man of Europe. God knows, I am poor enough; it only remains to be a man.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer