Time & Perspective Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson’s jab lands because it turns a seemingly innocuous virtue - efficiency - into a social tell. “Manners require time” isn’t etiquette as a list of rules; it’s etiquette as a temporal discipline. To be mannerly is to slow down enough to notice other people, to let conversations breathe, to write the extra line in a letter, to wait your turn without acting like waiting is an insult. Time, here, is the hidden cost of respect.

The second clause sharpens into a moral provocation: “nothing is more vulgar than haste.” Emerson weaponizes “vulgar” the way a philosopher with Brahmin sensibilities would: not just “tacky,” but coarse in spirit, a failure of self-command. Haste becomes a kind of spiritual bad breath - the smell of appetite, anxiety, and status-seeking. It’s also a critique of the emerging American tempo in his century: the market’s speed, the railroad’s compression of distance, the self-made man’s impatience with anything that doesn’t convert directly into output.

Subtext: if you’re rushing, you’re announcing that your time matters more than everyone else’s. That’s why haste reads as vulgar. It collapses the social world into a personal schedule. Emerson, the patron saint of self-reliance, is quietly insisting that self-possession includes restraint - the ability to resist being yanked around by urgency. Manners aren’t frills; they’re a brake system for modern life.