Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret… Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not […]
When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies, “Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life.”
So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more of it remains.
Henry Thoreau sends me a paper with the old fault of unlimited contradiction. The trick of his rhetoric is soon learned: it consists in substituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical antagonist. He praises wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic air; snow and ice for their warmth; villagers and wood-choppers for […]
Henry (Thoreau) is military. He seems stubborn and implacable; always manly and wise, but rarely sweet. One would say that, as Webster could never speak without an antagonist, so Henry does not feel himself except in opposition. He wants a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, requires a little sense of victory, a roll […]
A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.
The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
