Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes About Evolution

• The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Suicide, Religion, Spirituality

• If you have a nation of men who have risen to that height of moral cultivation that they will not declare war or carry arms, for they have not so much madness left in their brains, you have a nation of lovers, of benefactors, of true, great, and able men.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  War, Men, Brain

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1905). “The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”

• The most active lives have so much routine as to preclude progress almost equally with the most inactive.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Progress, Routine, Evolution

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alfred R. Ferguson (1965). “Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume V: 1835-1838”, p.274, Harvard University Press

• An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Progress, Steps, Evolution

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Ernest Spiller, Alfred Riggs Ferguson, Joseph Slater, Jean Ferguson Carr (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: English traits”, p.4, Harvard University Press

• The population of the world is a conditional population; these are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, gases, animals, and morals: the best that could yet live; there shall be a better, please God.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Animal, Progress, Population

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.297

• Very few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior quadruped organization. We call these millions men; but they are not yet men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all the music that can be brought to disengage him.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Race, Organization

  Ralph Waldo, Emerson, (2013). “Nature - Conduct of Life”, p.213, Read Books Ltd

• Behind every individual closes organization; before him opens liberty,--the Better, the Best. The first and worse races are dead.The second and imperfect races are dying out, or remain for the maturing of the higher. In the latest race, in man, every generosity, every new perception, the love and praise he extorts from his fellows, are certificates of advance out of fate into freedom.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Freedom, Fate, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1982). “Emerson: Selected Essays”, p.360, Penguin

• The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Running, Society, Wheels

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude”, p.13, Harvard University Press

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