Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Man's life is a progress, not a station.

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.

Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. This limbo and dust-hole of thought is presided over by a certain reason, too.

Culture opens the sense of beauty.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share.

The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it....we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.

Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Genius seems to consist merely in trueness of sight, in using such words as show that the man was an eye-witness, and not a repeater of what was told.

Nature is a frugal mother, and never gives without measure. When she has work to do, she qualifies men for that and sends them equipped.

Dear to us are those who love us... but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

The babe in arms is a channel through which the energies we call fate, love, and reason visibly stream.

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of the prophets. He saw with an open eye the mystery of the soul. . Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man.

The truth, the hope, of any time must be sought in the minorities. Michael Angelo was the conscience of Italy. We grow free with his name, and find it ornamental now, but in his own day his friends were few.

Now every one must do after his kind, be he asp or angel, and these must.

There is hope in extravagance, there is none in routine.

The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough, and the furrow, are of one stuff; and the stuff is such, and so much, that the variations of form are unimportant.

At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage.

Nature forever puts a premium on reality. What is done for effect is seen to be done for effect; what is done for love is felt to be done for love. A man inspires affection and honor because he was not lying in wait for these.

There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.

A strenuous soul hates cheap success.

The domestic man, who loves no music so well as his kitchen clock, and the airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on the hearth, has solaces which others never dream of.

An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. He is strong, not to do, but to live; not in his arms, but in his heart; not as an agent, but as a fact.

It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual.

True friends are two people who are comfortable sharing silence together.

Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use the tools, they use you. All tools are in one sense edge-tools, and dangerous.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions.

Only so much of life do I know as I have lived.

I admire answers to which no answers can be made.

Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object.

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects.

No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All.

There is also something excellent in every audience,--the capacity of virtue. They are ready to be beatified.

A right rule for a club would be, Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic. It requires people who are not surprised andshocked, who do and let do, and let be, who sink trifles, and know solid values, and who take a great deal for granted.

We seldom see anybody who is not uneasy or afraid to live.

It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

A day is a miniature eternity.

Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

For everything you gain, you lose something.

If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none. If there is grandeur in you, you will find grandeur in porters and sweeps.

The art of conversation, or the qualification for a good companion, is a certain self-control, which now holds the subject, now lets it go, with a respect for the emergencies of the moment.

The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder.