Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

How essential it is in youth to acquire some intellectual or artistic tastes, in order to furnish the mind, to be able to live inside a mind with attractive and interesting pictures on the walls.

The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments.

The word liberal distinguishes whatever nourishes the mind and spirit from the training which is merely practical or professional or from the trivialities which are no training at all.

Without creative personalities able to think and judge independently, the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

I'm happy to have interns at The Weekly Standard and happy to have readers of The Weekly Standard, but if you all tell me that you were busy reading Plato and [Lev] Tolstoy and playing violin in the orchestra, I'd say that was great. I wouldn't tell you to take time out from that to get involved in political journalism.

There can be no high civilization where there is not ample leisure.

The right to development is the measure of the respect of all other human rights.That should be our aim: a situation in which all individuals are enabled to maximize their potential, and to contribute to the evolution of society as a whole.

In my opinion, an individual without any love of the arts cannot be considered completely civilized.

The best test of the quality of a civilization is the quality of its leisure.

Education is the single most important job of the human race.

When people come to play music as they do to play bridge, civilization will have taken the longest stride forward since the beginning of time.

I made an executive decision in college when I learned how behind I was in the world of books, films, and music because of my rural upbringing. I really reduced the amount of time that sports took up in my life.I still have some Faulkner to get through.

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

An artist should be well read in the best books, and thoroughly high bred, both in heart and bearing. In a word, he should be fit for the best society, and should keef out of it.

Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

If education is beaten by training, civilization dies.

To have properly studied the liberal sciences gives a polish to our manners, and removes all awkwardness.

Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge,.

For the individual, education is the path to achievement and fulfillment; for the nation, it is a path to a society that is not only free but civilized; and for the world, it is the path to peace - for it is education that places reason over force.

En ge ne ral, plus un peuple est civilise , poli, moins ses moeurs sont poe tiques; tout s'affaiblit en s'adoucissant. Ingeneral, themore civilized and refinedthepeople, the less poetic are its morals; everything weakens as it mellows.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed anddrawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,--those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.

We can build an economy that does not destroy its natural support systems, a global community where the basic needs of all the Earth's people are satisfied, and a world that will allow us to think of ourselves as civilized. This is entirely doable.

The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.