Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.

Those who first cross the Atlantic in a steam-boat will be entitled to a great portion of applause. In a few years we expect such trips will be common ... and bold will they be who first make a passage to Europe in a steam-boat.

The honor you have given us goes not to us as a crew, but to ... all Americans, who believed, who persevered with us. What Apollo has begun we hope will spread out in many directions, not just in space, but underneath the seas, and in the cities to tell us unforgettably what we will and must do. There are footprints on the moon. Those footprints belong to each and every one of you, to all mankind. They are there because of the blood, sweat, and tears of millions of people. Those footprints are the symbol of true human spirit.

The true epic of our times is not "Arm's and the Man," but "Tools and the Man"--an infinitely wider kind of epic.

Being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong.

Today anything can be done - we have the techniques

There are many machines throughout history that were built to do something better than a human can.

He is noble who both feels and acts nobly.

Our expectations for a technology rise with its advancement.

Robin Goodfellow, for all his pranks and mischief, was the sweetest, most noble person I'd ever known, and I'd missed him terribly.

Mark my word - A combination airplane and motor car is coming.

The habitually punctual make all their mistakes right on time.

Science comforting man's animal poverty and leisuring his toil, hath humanized manners and social temper, and now above her globe-spredd net of speeded intercourse hath outrun all magic, and disclosing the secrecy of the reticent air hath woven a web of invisible strands spiriting the dumb inane with the quick matter of life.

The steam-engine I call fire-demon and great; but it is nothing to the invention of fire.

That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart.

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

It's true that compared with the scene when Unix started, today the ecological niches are fairly full, and fresh new OS ideas are harder to come by, or at least to propagate.

I thought that was a pretty stupid argument, really, because it's the final product that matters. The look of the film, however it's done, is still the cinematographer's vision in my mind. People said the same when color film came in, didn't they? The world evolves, and image-making evolves.

Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest of all the arts.

I feel like the smartest people in my field are busy reinforcing the old models with new technology.

The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.

Innovation no longer remains a choice but has become an imperative.

What [man landing on the moon] is doing up there is indulging his obsession with the impossible. The impossible infuriates and tantalizes him. Show him an impossible job and he will reduce it to a possibility so trite that eventually it bores him.

A nation has a fixed quantity of invention, and it will make itself felt.

Truth is so excellent, that if it praises but small things they become noble.