Ralph Waldo Emerson Saint Quotations

Conversation in society is found to be on a platform so low as to exclude science, the saint, and the poet.

The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.

If we tire of the saints, Shakspeare is our city of refuge.

The moral equalizes all; enriches, empowers all. It is the coin which buys all, and which all find in their pocket. Under the whipof the driver, the slave shall feel his equality with saints and heroes.

Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly make their executive officers out of saints.

It is very odd that Nature should be so unscrupulous. She is no saint . . .

Skepticism? Yes, but a saint is a skeptic once in twenty-four hours.

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

Nature, as we know her, is no saint.... She comes eating and drinking and sinning.

A self-denial, no less austere than the saint's, is demanded of the scholar. He must worship truth, and forgo all things for that,and choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby augmented.