Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitering and recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall combine for thesalvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve; and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs.

Every man has a vocation. The talent is the call.

The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of skepticism.

Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of art of human character, — a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.

If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.

But in our experience, man is cheap and friendship wants its deep sense. We affect to dwell with our friends in their absence, but we do not; when deed, word, or letter comes not, they let us go.

Everything runs to excess; every good quality is noxious if unmixed.

Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself.

Life only avails, not the having lived.

One thing is forever good; That one thing is Success.

If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false statement I could never stay there five minutes. But why come out? The streetis as false as the church, and when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to my speech, I have not got away from the lie.

Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.

This valley is the only place that comes up to the brag about it, and exceeds it.

Why has my motley diary no jokes? Because it is a soliloquy and every man is grave alone.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage.

The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.

We shun the rugged battle of fate where strength is born.

Had I but written as many odes in praise of Muhammad and Ali as I have composed for King Mahmud, they would have showered a hundred blessings on me.

Success goes thus invariably with a certain plus or positive power: an ounce of power must balance an ounce of weight.

In excited conversation we have glimpses of the universe, hints of power native to the soul, far-darting lights and shadows of an Andes landscape, such as we can hardly attain in lone meditation. Here are oracles sometimes profusely given, to which the memory goes back in barren hours.

Cowardice shuts the eyes till the sky is not larger than a calf-skin: shuts the eyes so that we cannot see the horse that is running away with us; worse, shuts the eyes of the mind and chills the heart.

The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we are waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with crimes.

A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him; wherever he goes.

Sorrow looks back, Worry looks around, Faith looks up

Throw a stone into the stream and the ripples that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.

Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity.

A mind might ponder its thought for an epoch, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach in a day.

When a dog is chasing after you, whistle for him.

We may like well to know what is Plato’s and what is Montesquieu’s or Goethe’s part, and what thought was always dear to the writer himself; but the worth of the sentences consists in their radiancy and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all our facts like a charm. We respect ourselves the more that we know them.

When all shoot at one mark, the gods join in the combat.

In our Mechanics' Fair, there must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenter's planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer instruments,--rain-gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander.

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.

Let us leave hurry to slaves.

A Judge may be a farmer; but he is not to geld his own pigs.

In the Fiji islands, it appears, cannibalism is now familiar. They eat thier own wives and children. We only devour widows' houses, and great merchants outwit and absorb the substance of small ones, and every man feeds on his neighbor's labor if he can. It is a milder form of cannibalism.

Spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. True prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world.

If you believe in the soul, do not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of cause and effect.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.

The city is recruited from the country.

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom.

We do not yet trust the unknown powers of thought. Whence came all these tools, inventions, book laws, parties, kingdoms? Out of the invisible world, through a few brains. The arts and institutions of men are created out of thought. The powers that make the capitalist are metaphysical, the force of method and force of will makes trade, and builds towns.

The hero is he who is immovably centered.