"A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool."

Ralph Waldo Emerson Literature See all quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson →

React to this quote

More by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

“There is a freemasonry among the dull by which they recognize and are sociable with the dull, as surely as a correspondent tact in men of genius.”

“The cup of life is not so shallow That we have drained the best That all the wine at once we swallow And lees make all the rest.”

“We are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder.”

“A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.”

“Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding."

— Mortimer Adler

Philosophy1902–2001

#wisdom

"I suggest that we might want to depose this incumbent God and start dealing with The Real World. He's proven — time and again — to be cruel, capricious, and vindictive. He drowns, crushes, burns, and …"

— James Randi

Psychology1928–2020

#power

"With few exceptions, the bulk of the collected lesion evidence up through the 1950s into the early '60s converged to support the picture of a leading, more highly evolved and intellectual left hemisph…"

— Roger Wolcott Sperry

Science1913–1994

#mind

"The tenement – the name derives from a fifteenth-century legal term for a multiple dwelling – always seemed to me a “ship afloat in concrete.” After all didn’t the building carry passengers on a voyag…"

— Will Eisner

Literature1917–2005

#family