Ralph Waldo Emerson Civilization Quotations

There are many faculties in man, each of which takes its turn of activity, and that faculty which is paramount in any period and exerts itself through the strongest nation, determines the civility of that age: and each age thinks its own the perfection of reason.

The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.

What is civilization? I answer, the power of good women.

Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate.

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

In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight.

The reward of commercial civilization is the ability to consume a never-ending array of products.There are limits beyond which commodities cannot be multiplied without preventing their consumers from affirming themselves through the exercise of their personal freedom.When market dependence reaches a certain threshold it deprives people of their power to live creatively and to act autonomously. And precisely because this new impotence is so deeply experienced, it is expressed with difficulty.

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

The test of civilization is the power of drawing the most benefit out of cities.

I do not speak with any fondness but the language of coolest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town whichwas appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America.

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.

He is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor; and how to give access to themasterpieces of art and nature, is the problem of civilization.

The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.

It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears.

The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power--the gentleman.

Wise cultivated, genial conversation is the last flower of civilization, and the best result which life has to offer us,--a cup for gods, which has no repentance. Conversation is our account of ourselves. All we have, all we can, all we know, is brought into play, and as the reproduction in finer form, of all our havings.

Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.

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

Civilization depends on morality.