Ralph Marvell Quotes

Her mind was as destitute of beauty and mystery as the prairie school-house in which she had been educated; and her ideals seemed to Ralph as pathetic as the ornaments made of corks and cigar-bands with which her infant hands had been taught to adorn it. He was beginning to understand this, and learning to adapt himself to the narrow compass of her experience. ~ Edith Wharton

The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we are waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with crimes. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

No Christian can be a pessimist, for Christianity is a system of radical optimism. ~ William Ralph Inge

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

What are you suggesting I do Ralph?'
'I'm suggesting you tell the bloody truth whatever it is. The only place lying leads is trouble.'
"Sometimes that's the only place telling the truth get you, too. ~ M.L. Stedman

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature? ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science, Nature,-O, I've yearned to open some page. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A scholar does not wish to be always pumping his brains; he wants gossips. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The primary wisdom is intuition. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their origin. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truth and love are two of the most powerful things in the world; and when they both go together they cannot easily be withstood. ~ Ralph Cudworth

The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the cool dark basement, she whispers, "It's not Ralph, is it?"
Cabel's quiet for a moment, as if he's thinking, "You mean like Forever Ralph? Uh, no."
"You've read Forever?" Janie is incredulous.
"There wasn't much else to chose from on the hospital library cart, and Deenie was always checked out," Cable says sarcastically.
"Did you like it?"
Cabel laughs softly, "Um ... well, it wasn't the wisest thing to read for a fourteen-year-old guy with fresh skin grafts in the general area down there, if you know what I mean. ~ Lisa McMann

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The influence of the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to the degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet, time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I feel genuinely sorry for those who are so blinded by narrow partisanship that they cannot appreciate Limbaugh's energy, intelligence and satiric skill. They live in a box with bags over their heads. Though he and I hardly agree on politics (I voted for Ralph Nader last year and may go Green again in 2004), I respect Limbaugh as a political analyst and deft rhetorician who is a master of the microphone and who knows how to engage and challenge a vast audience. ~ Camille Paglia

If your friend has displeased you, you shall not sit down to consider it, for he has already lost all memory of the passage, and has doubled his power to serve you, and, ere you can rise up again, will burden you with blessings. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Talent finds its models, methods, and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cause and effect are two sides of one fact. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the work of a writer of genius, we rediscover our own neglected thoughts. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of someone's mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no lack of bravery in the ranks of our armed forces, but bureaucratic cowardice rules in our intelligence establishment (as well as at the higher levels of military command). ~ Ralph Peters

To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not? ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let go of your attachment to being right, and suddenly your mind is more open. You're able to benefit from the unique viewpoints of others, without being crippled by your own judgment. ~ Ralph Marston

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Books are the best type of influence of the past ... Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Jobs described Mike Markkula's maxim that a good company must "impute"- it must convey its values and importance in everything it does, from packaging to marketing. Johnson loved it. It definitely applied to a company's stores. " The store will become the most powerful physical expression of the brand," he predicted. He said that when he was young he had gone to the wood-paneled, art-filled mansion-like store that Ralph Lauren had created at Seventy-second and Madison in Manhattan. " Whenever I buy a polo shirt, I think of that mansion, which was a physical expression of Ralph's ideals," Johnson said. " Mickey Drexler did that with the Gap. You couldn't think of a Gap product without thinking of the Great Gap store with the clean space and wood floors and white walls and folded merchandise. ~ Walter Isaacson

Conversation is our account of ourselves ... Conversation is the vent of character as well as thoughts ... It is the laboratory of the student. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no king or sovereign state
That can fix a hero's rate;
Each to all is venerable. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wise men read very sharply all of your private history in your look and gait and behavior. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing, to pass the brute body and search the life and reason which causes it to exist; - to see that the object is always flowing away, whilst the spirit or necessity which causes it subsists. Its essential mark is that it betrays in every word instant activity of mind, shown in new uses of every fact and image, in preternatural quickness or perception of relations. All its words are poems. It is a presence of mind that gives a miraculous command of all means of uttering the thought and feeling of the moment. The poet squanders on the hour an amount of life that would more than furnish the seventy years of the man that stands next him. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The finest poetry was first experience. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In music, the punctuation is absolutely strict, the bars and rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict, because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the score. ~ Ralph Richardson

In each life there comes at least one moment, which, if recognized and seized, transforms the course of that life forever. Rely, therefore, on radical trust, even though the moment may call for you to leap empty-handed into the void. ~ Ralph Blum

Christians take pride in proclaiming they are sheep, the most stupid of all mammals, incapable of defending themselves, living only to feed, multiply, and be fleeced periodically. ~ Ralph Perier

I have always taken care of my body; I'm not a drinker, I've never smoked. And I've always exercised. That's all you have to do. ~ Ralph Hall

The clothes that I design and everything I've done is about life and how people live and how they want to live and how they dream they'll live. That's what I do. ~ Ralph Lauren

Every man contemplates an angel in his future self ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Violence is the weapon of the weak. ~ Ralph Abernathy

Religion must always be a crab fruit; it cannot be grafted, and keep its wild beauty. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don't give a damn whether they're getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don't ever try to understand what we're here for. They just don't care. Americans or not, they sleep no matter what, they're bloated mollusks, no sensibility, no trouble with their conscience.
I'd seen too many troubling things to be easy in my mind. I knew too much and not enough. I'd better go out, I said to myself, I'd better go out again. Maybe I'll meet Robinson. Naturally that was an idiotic idea, but I dreamed it up as an excuse for going out again, because no matter how I tossed and turned on my narrow bed, I couldn't snatch the tiniest scrap of sleep. Even masturbation, at times like that, provides neither comfort nor entertainment. Then you're really in despair. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine