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Ralph Waldo Emerson would definitely be my homeboy. -- Rainn Wilson
Emerson then incarnated the moral optimism, the progress, and the energy of the American spirit. -- Howard Mumford Jones
My Mt. Rushmore of hero worship would include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Marcus Aurelius, Frank Sinatra and Barry White. -- Karen Duffy
My heroes are, above all, the great 19th-century Americans: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and the others. I love the way they think. -- Marilynne Robinson
Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history. -- Howard Mumford Jones
My favorite bands were Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, Uriah Heep, Grand Funk Railroad. If you listen to some of my early music, you can hear it. -- John Tesh
Michael Emerson is just a prince. There's something about him. He's so sweet. I don't know how to describe it. There's something about him that's a bit royal. -- Sarah Shahi
Life is too full of distractions nowadays. When I was a kid we had a little Emerson radio and that was it. We were more dedicated. We didn't have a choice. -- Stan Getz
I'm the man who sits behind a table and tells true stories from his life. I'm also an actor. I was trained as an actor at Emerson College, and I use that training to play myself. -- Spalding Gray
When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that William James was honored to be asked to speak at a centenary celebration. -- Howard Mumford Jones
I went to Concord, a young woman from the backwoods, firm in belief that Emerson was the first of living men. He was the modern Moses who had talked with God apart and could interpret Him to us. -- Rebecca Harding Davis
Their spirituality was in nature, even though Emerson was a preacher on the pulpit, he ended up going out into nature for direct, face-to-face communication with God, if you want to call all of this creation part of God. -- Story Musgrave
I didn't care at all about losing, but I just didn't want Emerson to feel bad, You know, I didn't win, but Felicity won, and when you come to the set next time, you can give her a big congratulations. -- Teri Hatcher
When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson. -- Marilynne Robinson
I love the fact that it starts from there, and you don't know where it's gonna go. Wait long enough - love will find you. Everything's a surprise. When you think you've got it all figured out... as Emerson said, the dice of God are always loaded. -- Hector Elizondo
Emerson:bite me Whitne:you wish -- Meg Cabot
The ancestor of every action is a thought. â??Ralph Waldo Emerson -- David Allen
He had gone to the higher Sierras... [about Ralph Waldo Emerson's death] -- John Muir
[Emerson] was interested not in the bookworm, not even in the thinker, only in Man Thinking. -- Robert D. Richardson
More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past. -- Robert Penn Warren
We are reformers in the spring, but iin autumn we stand by the old. Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Ron Suskind
Emerson is a person who lives instinctively on ambrosia - and leaves everything indigestible on his plate. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on. -- James Russell Lowell
If you take a man by surprise, and behave with sufficient arrogance, he will generally do what you ask. -Emerson -- Barbara Mertz
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be the respected patriarch of an ordinary English family." "Very boring, Emerson. -- Barbara Mertz
You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes. -- David Markson
Dad said I would always be "high minded and low waged" from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right. -- Jim Harrison
Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth?-Or at least, "Do you care about the same truth? -- C. S. Lewis
The great spiritual geniuses, whether it was Moses, Buddha, Plato, Socrates, Jesus, or Emerson..... have taught man to look within himself to find God. -- Ernest Holmes
I wouldn't know where to start." "He who chooses the beginning of the road chooses the place it leads to." "Thoreau?" "Harry Emerson Fosdick... -- Kami Garcia
I could...see in Emerson...that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions. -- Herman Melville
'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. -- Henry Miller
For character, to prepare for the inevitable I recommend selections from [Ralph Waldo] Emerson. His writings have done for me far more than all other reading. -- Rutherford B. Hayes
It is difficult to be funny and great at the same time. Aristophanes and Moliere and Mark Twain must sit below Aristotle and Bossuet and Emerson. -- Stephen Leacock
Most thoughtful Americans of today seem to have forgotten how strongly their own and immediate predecessors, Emerson, Hawthorne and Whitman, were still preoccupied with the essence behind things. -- Johan Huizinga
Emerson, Lake & Palmer or King Crimson or Gentle Giant - the worst prog rock references I can come up with. Though I totally loved those groups as a kid. -- Duncan Sheik
What a new face courage puts on everything. - Ralph Waldo Emerson To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Let every man shovel out his own snow, and the whole city will be passable," said Gamache. Seeing Beauvoir's puzzled expression he added, "Emerson.""Lake and Palmer?""Ralph and Waldo. -- Louise Penny
When [Ralph Waldo] Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, 'What are you doing in there?' it was reported that Thoreau replied, 'What are you doing out there?' -- Howard Zinn
I had refused Emerson's well-meant offers of assistance, knowing his efforts would be confined to moving the furniture to the wrong places and demanding how much longer the process would take. -- Barbara Mertz
"All government in essence," says Emerson, "is tyranny." It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual. -- Emma Goldman
Emerson was not passionate about abolition. He wasn't a passionate person. He was a cool intellectual, and I think he probably was a little uncomfortable with passionate people, but he was against slavery. -- Nell Irvin Painter
Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself. -- Leon Edel
You are softening toward the young rascal because he is ill, and because he says he likes cats." "It is an engaging quality, Emerson." "That depends," said Emerson darkly, "on how he likes them. -- Barbara Mertz
I have not, in general, much belief in the ability of woman as a creative artist. Unwritten lyrics, as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson said once when we conversed on this subject, should be her forte. -- Fredrika Bremer
Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart. -- Mary Oliver
Walt Whitman and Emerson are the poets who have given the world more than anyone else. Perhaps Whitman is not so widely read in England, but England never appreciates a poet until he is dead. -- Oscar Wilde
...something which, for want of a more definite term at present, I must be permitted to be called queer; but which Mr. Coleridge would have called mystical, Mr. Kant pantheistical, Mr. Carlyle twistical, and Mr. Emerson hyperquizzitistical. -- Edgar Allan Poe
We are always getting to live, as Ralph Waldo Emerson used to say, but never living. Or as poor Frances learned in the children's story, it is always bread and jam tomorrow, never brad and jam today. -- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said that the only way to have a friend is to be one. We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion or mistrust or with fear. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
India was China's teacher in religion and imaginative literature, and the world's teacher in trignometry, quandratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as well as in philosophy, and that she inspired Boccaccio, Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Emerson, and probably also old Aesop. -- Lin Yutang
I pretend no originality in observing that mass education was motivated in part by the perceived need to "educate them to keep them from our throats," to borrow Ralph Waldo Emerson's parody of elite fears that inspired early advocates of public mass education. -- Noam Chomsky
There is, as Emerson says, some central idea or conception of yourself by which all the facts of your life are arranged and classified. Change this central idea and you change the arrangement or classification of all the fact and circumstances of your life. -- Wallace D. Wattles
Part of the power of Emerson's individualism is his insistence, at crucial moments, that individualism does not mean isolation or self-sufficiency. This is not a paradox, for it is only the strong individual who can frankly concede the sometimes surprising extent of his own dependence. -- Robert D. Richardson
When you talk about "infertility" you're already using a land-based metaphor - a woman's body compared to property, to be considered fruitful or barren. And "estate" encompasses both legacy and landscape. Think of Emerson, referring to his son's death as "the loss of a beautiful estate." -- Monica Youn
At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspeare. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd -- Walt Whitman
President Heber J. Grant often quoted the following statement, which is sometimes attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: "That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do-not that the nature of the thing is changed, but that our power to do is increased.' -- Heber J. Grant
In 1848, Thoreau went to jail for refusing, as a protest against the Mexican war, to pay his poll tax. When RW Emerson came to bail him out, Emerson said, 'Henry, what are you doing in there?' Thoreau quietly replied, 'Ralph, what are you doing out there?' -- Henry David Thoreau
The landscape belongs to the person who looks at it..." -Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough for literature. - Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
What lies behind us & what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. -Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
To laugh often and much ... this is to have succeeded. Probably not from Emerson: here's the full quotation and the story. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it.--Harry Emerson FosdickNo one can get inner peace by pouncing on it. -- Harry Emerson Fosdick
Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can't get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head. -- Pico Iyer
We all know how we can be turned around by a magic place; that's why we travel, often. And yet we all know, too, that the change cannot be guaranteed. Travel is a fool's paradise, Emerson reminded us, if we think that we can find anything far off that we could not find at home. -- Pico Iyer
When I was a kid, I used to listen to my Emerson radio late at night under the covers. I started by listening to jazz in the late 1940s and then vocal harmony groups like the Four Freshmen, the Modernaires and the Hi-Lo's. I loved Stan Kenton's big band - with those dark chords and musicians who could swing cool with individual sounds. -- Frankie Valli
In high school, I went to a place called the Mountain School. It's on a farm in Vermont, and I read Emerson and Thoreau and ran around the woods. Now I go hiking with a bunch of my comedy buddies. We talk about our emotions. I also do a lot of writing on hikes, just to get the blood flowing and the ideas moving. -- Nick Kroll
I studied journalism at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. I did my graduate work at Emerson in Boston, and I was actually a reporter for a year in New York and New Jersey. It dawned on me that I wasn't cut out for that line of work. I mean... there's a certain thing that really good reports have that I just didn't. -- Nolan North
In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks Greek architecture is the perfect flowering of geometry. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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