What you do thunders above your head so loudly, I cannot hear the words you speak.
Ralph Waldo EmersonReligious literature has eminent examples, and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have tapped.
Ralph Waldo EmersonTo eat bread is one thing; to love the precepts of Christ and resolve to obey them is quite another.
Ralph Waldo EmersonThere are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.
Ralph Waldo EmersonMy own mind is the direct revelation which I have from God and far least liable to mistake in telling his will of any revelation.
Ralph Waldo EmersonPhysical force has no value, where there is nothing else. Snow in snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxury of ice is in tropical countries, and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth; and of electricity, not the volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man, are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific.
Ralph Waldo Emerson