Ralph Waldo Emerson Firsts Quotations

Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.

Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament.

The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds.

Mankind divides itself into two classes,--benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast; the first a handful.

We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause.

One can never truly savor success until first tasting adversity.

Between cultivated minds the first interview is the best.

Always pay; for first or last you must pay your entire debt.

All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.

The first point of courtesy must always be truth.

No rent-roll nor army-list can dignify skulking and dissimulation: and the first point of courtesy must always be truth, as really all the forms of good-breeding point that way.

First be a good animal.

Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

Health is the first muse, and sleep is the condition to produce it.

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

I honor health as the first Muse.

Power is the first good.

The first thing a great person does is make us realize the insignificance of circumstance.

Every natural power exhilarates; a true talent delights the possessor first.

Why should we not have a first-hand and immediate experience of God?

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

The finest poetry was first experience.

Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying~out of gardens.

Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use...In God, every end is converted into a new means.

Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first.