Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Society & Civilization (24 Quotes)

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

When a man meets his make, society begins.

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

Talent finds its models, methods, and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within.

Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

The world is upheld by the veracity of good men they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

The pest of society are the egotist, they are dull and bright, sacred and profane, course and fine. It is a disease that like the flu falls on all constitutions.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other.... Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out.

Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.

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

Society is a hospital of incurables.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

Civilization depends on morality.

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome always we are invited to work only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action. An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.... The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many frivolous people, who make up society, are organic, and society is a hospital of incurables

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions.

Society always consists in the greatest part, of young and foolish persons.

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.