Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

A man in the wrong may more easily be convinced than one half right.

An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere.

To be gret is to be misunderstood.

The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.

Its the not the Destination, It's the journey.

Life is a festival only to the wise.

The sky is the ultimate art gallery just above us.

That which we call sin in others is experiment for us.

Look sharply after your own thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen on your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear; and you shall never find that perception again; never, I say-but perhaps years, ages, and I know not what events and worlds my lie between you and its return.

Without looking, then, to those extraordinary social influences which are now acting in precisely this direction, but only at whatis inevitably doing around us, I think we must regard the land as a commanding and increasing power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.

The Soul rules over matter. Matter may pass away like a mote in the sunbeam, may be absorbed into the immensity of God, as a mistis absorbed into the heat of the Sun--but the soul is the kingdom of God, the abode of love, of truth, of virtue.

Always do what you are afraid to do.

I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

Nature is methodical, and doeth her work well. Time is never to be hurried.

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

Thought is the seed of action.

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.

The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown him. He snaps his fingers at laws; and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.

The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.

In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, with hope & love, & go as brave as the zodiack. In age we put out another sort of perspiration; gout, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, and avarice.

He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread

Necessity does everything well.

Nothing is quite beautiful alone; nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace.

The path of things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them?

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which, in replacing the broken bone, contents itself with releasing the parts from false position; they fly into place by the action of the muscles. On this art of nature all our arts rely.

Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby, to be picked up and laid down like a game of solitaire. It is a grand passion. It seizes a person whole and once it has done so, he/she will have to accept that his life will be radically changed.

The religions we call false were once true.

Let him be great, and love shall follow him.

Every man has a choice between love of truth and love of repose. Love of repose brings him a solid reputation and peaceful life; love of truth keeps him in suspense. A man who loves truth respects the highest law of his being.

No man has ever had a point of pride that was not injurious to him.

A great teacher makes hard things easy.

The way to learn German, is, to read the same dozen pages over and over a hundred times, till you know every word and particle in them, and can pronounce and repeat them by heart.

Man is the broken giant, and in all his weakness both his body and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature.

If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people, to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture.

The dearest events are summer-rain.

Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar’s dinner, from a hundred charities?

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings

A good deal of our politics is physiological.

Be a gift and a benediction.

A man should give us a sense of mass.

We are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder.

Fear always springs from ignorance.

Nor count compartments of the floors, But mount to paradise By the stairway of surprise.

I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-borne treasures home.