Ralph Waldo Emerson
American essayist and poet
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, The Poet, 1844
Posted on May 6, 2004 at 3:51 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think today in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, Self-Reliance, 1841
Posted on March 8, 2000 at 7:40 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
All writing should be selection in order to drop every dead word. Why do you not save out of your speech or thinking only the vital things—the spirited mot which amused or warmed you when you spoke it—because of its luck & newness. I have just been reading, in this careful book of a most intelligent & learned man, a number of flat conventional words & sentences. If a man would learn to read his own manuscript severely—becoming really a third person, & search only for what interested him, he would blot to purpose—& how every page would gain! Then all the words will be sprightly, & every sentence a surprise.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, Good Writing, 1869
Posted on January 13, 2000 at 10:39 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, Nominalist and Realist, 1844
Posted on October 4, 1999 at 10:53 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, — the raw material of possible poems and histories.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, In Praise of Books, 1860
Posted on October 6, 2000 at 10:33 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The music than can deepest reach,
And cure all ill, is cordial speech.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, The Conduct of Life, 1860
Posted on July 3, 2000 at 9:21 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Life is our dictionary. ... I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, The American Scholar, 1837
Posted on June 12, 2000 at 11:45 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, the practised man relies on the language of the first.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, The Conduct of Life, 1860
Posted on April 28, 1999 at 7:42 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, The Conduct of Life, 1860
Posted on May 31, 1999 at 9:15 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, Nature, 1836
Posted on June 24, 1999 at 5:21 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, Conduct of Life, 1870
Posted on January 7, 2003 at 11:26 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, Letters and Social Aims, 1876
Posted on July 15, 2002 at 11:31 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, English Traits, 1856
Posted on June 6, 2002 at 6:58 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, Essays
Posted on July 10, 2003 at 9:24 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which must yet have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, Letter to Walt Whitman on the publication of Leaves of Grass
Posted on June 4, 2003 at 6:46 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, Representative Men
Posted on July 1, 2003 at 2:43 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, Journals
Posted on September 10, 2003 at 5:28 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, The Man of Letters
Posted on March 13, 2003 at 6:24 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
I do not hesitate to read . . . all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable—any real insight or broad human sentiment.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, Society and Solitude, 1870
Posted on September 29, 2003 at 10:29 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
A man's library is a sort of harem.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, Society and Solitude
Posted on April 30, 2003 at 11:56 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, English Traits
Posted on June 12, 2003 at 9:22 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
In conversation, the game is to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Posted on April 10, 2002 at 3:48 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, Essays
Posted on May 24, 2002 at 6:42 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Language is the archives of history.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, The Poet, 1844
Posted on February 4, 2002 at 10:41 AM
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