Philosophy Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.”

“When a man is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something.”

“Imitation is suicide.”

“I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live.”

“Every word was once a poem.”

“Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.”

“Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.”

“…questioning the existence of God may begin because of one’s sense of disappointment rather than because of a line of reasoning. Disappointment can bring disillusionment, and disillusionment can get quite a grip on us. It may be the case that, next to the grip of disillusionment, whatever reasons we can think of to believe that God exists or that God is good will appear weak. So sometimes the reason we do not believe or the reason we stop believing is not the intellectual challenge to believing in God. Sometimes, the grip of disillusionment cannot be matched by things that seem to be only abstract or theoretical.”

“When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker’s mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. […] In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more than hot air can serve those of communication.”

“This body is fragile. It is just flesh. Listen to the heartbeat. Life depends on the pumping of a muscle.”