Ralph Waldo Emerson Years Quotations

Each moment of the year has its own beauty.

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.

The years in your life are less important than the life in your years.

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!

The rule for hospitality and Irish "help," is, to have the same dinner every day throughout the year. At last, Mrs. O'Shaughnessylearns to cook it to a nicety, the host learns to carve it, and the guests are well served.

The frost which kills the harvest of a year saves the harvest of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust.

The farmer after sacrificing pleasure, taste, freedom, thought, love, to his work, turns out often a bankrupt, like the merchant.This result might well seem astounding. All this drudgery, from cockcrowing to starlight, for all these years, to end in mortgages and the auctioneer's flag, and removing from bad to worse. It is time to have the thing looked into, and with a sifting criticism ascertained who is the fool.

When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me,--when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?

You've got to be taught, to hate and fear, You've got to be taught, from year to year, It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear, You've got to be carefully taught.

Fear, when your friends say to you what you have done well, and say it through; but when they stand with uncertain timid looks of respect and half-dislike, and must suspend their judgement for years to come, you may begin to hope.

It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.

If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterwards.

The sermon which I write inquisitive of truth is good a year after, but that which is written because a sermon must be writ is musty the next day.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year. He only is right who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded by worry, fret and anxiety. Finish every day, and be done with it. You have done what you could.

The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.

Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago, but it is put to better use.

The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are, --/ Never read a book that is not a year old./ Never read any but the famed books./ Never read any but what you like.

The cannon will not suffer any other sound to be heard for miles and for years around it.

When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare,--muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise.

The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown him. He snaps his fingers at laws; and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.

Wherever there is power, there is age. Don't be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.

When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.

Never read a book that is not a year old.

Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.

Pines a thousand years old. Every year they must go farther for them: they recede, like beavers and Indians, before the white man.

In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem.

Look sharply after your own thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen on your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear; and you shall never find that perception again; never, I say-but perhaps years, ages, and I know not what events and worlds my lie between you and its return.

If it costs ten years, and ten to recover the general prosperity, the destruction of the South is worth so much.

Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years.

Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year.

In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods we return to reason and faith.

There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.