Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

My mind is always racing.

The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.

In my mind it's so much fun to have something that has clues and is mysterious - something that is understood intuitively rather than just being spoon-fed to you. That's the beauty of cinema, and it's hardly ever even tried. These days, most films are pretty easily understood, and so people's minds stop working.

The intelligent man is never bored.

There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.

Everything you think of that keeps you occupied is a friend.

I would call an intellectual one whose instrument of work - his mind - is also his major source of pleasure; a man whose entertainment is his intelligence.

To an active mind, indolence is more painful than labor.

I'm not sure if I could tell the difference—between just staring into space and thinking. We're usually thinking all the time, aren't we? Not that we live in order to think, but the opposite isn't true either—that we think in order to live. I believe, contrary to Descartes, that we sometimes think in order not to be. Staring into space might unintentionally have the opposite effect.

Love is the affection of a mind that has nothing better to engage it.

The more I keep myself occupied and jump from thing to thing, the more I think it enriches both.

A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts.

The more I write, the more I've come to realize that books have a different place in our society than other media. Books are different from television or film because they ask you to finish the project. You have to be actively engaged to read a book. It's more like a blueprint. What it really is, is an opportunity... A book is a place where you're forced to use your imagination. I find it disappointing that you're not being asked to imagine more.

What is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?

anything that stretches the mind is a help to the potential author.

You can, after all, reduce the reasons for watching TV to but two: to be lulled, and to be stimulated. Some people do one sometimes, the other sometimes. Some people do all of one or all of the other.

Television is bubble-gum for the mind.

It really don't matter what you're thinking about, as long as you're thinking about something.

There is no study in the world which brings into more harmonious action all the faculties of the mind than [mathematics], ... or, like this, seems to raise them, by successive steps of initiation, to higher and higher states of conscious intellectual being.

Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms

It is man's own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.

What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness.