Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Sense & Perception (28 Quotes)

Work and thou canst escape the reward whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.

Common sense is as rare as genius, - is the basis of genius

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.

A man cannot utter two or three sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or in that of ideas and imagination, or in the realm of intuitions and duty.

Common sense is the wick of the candle.

The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint is taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.

Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances, the senses are despotic

Love of beauty is taste.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates not only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.

Common sense is as rare as genius.

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

Thought is the seed of action but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.

There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to Beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense.

Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow. Miss C. F. Forbes, (18171911).

Prudence is the virtue of the sense. It is the science of Appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life.

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.

The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.

The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes and exertions --an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own.

All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of man's limbs and senses.

When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man.

I gave thee sight, where is it now?