Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Age (12 Quotes)

But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought from age to age.

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library a company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years.... The thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.

Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

All diseases run into one, old age.

Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design - and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients

Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age.

The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe the key to all ages is Imbecility imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments victims of gravity,

Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen librarya company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age.

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.

Wherever there is power there is age.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared ...