Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes About Comedy

• The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness; a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Time, Laughter, Honesty

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1875). “Letters and Social Aims”, p.127

• The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Ties, Insanity

  1876 Letters and Social Aims,'The Comic'.

• It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Eye, Tragedy, Vices

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joel Porte (1982). “Emerson in His Journals”, p.98, Harvard University Press

• Spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. True prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Real, Coward, Finals

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.62, Courier Corporation

• The household is a school of power. There, within the door, learn the tragi-comedy of human life.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  School, Power, Doors

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2738, Delphi Classics

• The world of men show like a comedy without laughter: populations, interests, government, history; 't is all toy figures in a toyhouse.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Laughter, Men, Population

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.328

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