"Children and savages use only nouns or..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.
More by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Though we travel the world over to find beauty, we must carry it with us or we find it not . . . The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great difference in beholders.”
“Nothing can work damage to me except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me and never am a real sufferer except by my own fault.”
“Others can get in your way temporarily, but only you can get out of your way permanently. Our best thoughts come from others.”
More on Language
“Those things for which we find words, are things we have already overcome.”
“For me, being literate and articulate is a form of judo, of overcoming the [system] by its own method.”
“We are being at once wisely aware of our own frivolity if we avoid hitting and whacking and prefer 'striking' and 'smiting'; talk and chat and prefer 'speech' and 'discourse'; well-bred, brilliant, or polite noblemen (visions of snobbery columns in the Press, and fat men on the Riviera) and prefer the 'worthy, brave and courteous men' of long ago.”
More on Childhood
“I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.”
“I didn't know much about golf growing up.”
“In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.”