Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes About Rhetoric

• When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with His presence.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  God, Heart, Fire

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2008). “The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.65, Penguin

• It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Faults, Facts, States

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Self-Reliance, the Over-Soul, and Other Essays”, p.17, Coyote Canyon Press

• The mystic must be steadily told,-All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,-universal signs, instead of these village symbols,-and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Religious, Errors, Excess

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1982). “Emerson: Selected Essays”, p.264, Penguin

• I consider theology to be the rhetoric of morals.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Moral, Rhetoric, Theology

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2730, Delphi Classics

• Numbers serve to discipline rhetoric. Without them it is too easy to follow flights of fancy, to ignore the world as it is and to remold it nearer the heart's desire.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Heart, Numbers, Discipline

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