Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of nature,--the sweet, without the other side,--the bitter.

To eat bread is one thing; to love the precepts of Christ and resolve to obey them is quite another.

All great successes are the triumph of persistence.

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'always do what you are afraid to do.'

With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses with truths that have always been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian, than with persons in the house.

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.

The laws of each are convertible into the laws of any other.

Our distrust is very expensive.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

When it is dark enough, men see the stars.

Let not the emphasis of hospitality lie in bed and board; but let truth and love and honor and courtesy flow in all thy deeds.

The virtue you would like to have, assume it is already yours, appropriate it, enter into the part and live the character just as the great actor is absorbed in... the part he plays.

I think no virtue goes with size.

Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow.

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

[D]ivine Providence... keeps the universe open in every direction to the soul.

With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses sing.

The difference between the actual and the ideal force of man is happily figured in by the schoolmen, in saying, that the knowledgeof man is an evening knowledge, vespertina cognitio, but that of God is a morning knowledge, matutina cognitio.

Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it.

Calmness is always godlike.

The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.

The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.

We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected.

If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.

I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One's enough.

Man begins life helpless. The babe is in paroxysms of fear the moment its nurse leaves it alone, and it comes so slowly to any power of self-protection that mothers say the salvation of the life and health of a young child is a perpetual miracle.

Knowledge is the antidote to fear

Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

Women see better than men. Men see lazily, if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act.

Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.

The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.

For the existing world is not a dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as a dream; neither is it a disease; but it is the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born.

Nature is the symbol of Spirit.

Friendship buys friendship.

A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engraffed with a foreign stock.

The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these. It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars.

All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the current of events, and strong with their strength.

Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to love the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love Him was happiness;--to love Him in others' virtues.

Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate.

Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of form.

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole.

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed.