Skip to content

Ralph Waldo Emerson on Books

1803–1882 United States

← All quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

14 quotes

In every man's memory, with the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books which met his views.

Letters and Social Aims (1876)

Never read any book that is not a year old.

Society and Solitude (1870)

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature.

Letters and Social Aims (1876)

The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.

Journals (1822)

We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.

Letters and Social Aims (1876)

An ingenious anatomist has written a book to prove that races are imperishable, but nations are pliant political constructions, easily changed or destroyed.

If we encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read.

Letters and Social Aims (1876)

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear.

Society and Solitude (1870)

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

Letters and Social Aims (1876)

Books are the best things, well used: abused, among the worst.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Letters and Social Aims (1876)

No book was ever written down by any but itself.

There are many virtues in books, but the essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions which distribute facts, and are the formulas which supersede all histories.

Letters and Social Aims (1876)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Ralph Waldo Emerson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.