Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Nature is a rag merchant, who works up every shred and ort and end into new creations.

There is no one who does not exaggerate!

Profound sincerity is the only basis of talent as of character.

Give me wine to wash me clean of the weather-stains of cares

Under every deep a lower deep opens.

I like man, but not men.

Come out of the azure. Love the day. Do not leave the sky out of your landscape.

Heaven often protects valuable souls charged with great secrets, great ideas, by long shutting them up with their own thoughts.

Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.

The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.

The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.

Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs.

Go out of the house to see the moon, and 't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who could ever clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone: 't is only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence.

We want but two or three friends, but these we cannot do without, and they serve us in every thought we think.

Every artist was first an amateur.

The human body is a magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint is taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.

It is a capital blunder; as you discover, when another man recites his charities.

The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.

For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly.

I do not speak with any fondness but the language of coolest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town whichwas appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America.

I am become a transparent eyeball.

I didn't find my friends; the good Lord gave them to me.

He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself.

All men in the abstract are just and good.

I see my trees repair their boughs.

Genius has no taste for weaving sand.

My son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life. You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest of all.

Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers. Christian Bovee A little praise Goes a great ways.

The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it.

Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds.

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous or when they are most luxurious-they are conservatives after dinner.

Overhead the sanctities of the stars shine forever-more... pouring satire on the pompous business of the day which they close, and making the generations of men show slight and evanescent.

How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment.

To make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom.

What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.

The refining influence is the study of art, which is the science of beauty; and I find that every man values every scrap of knowledge in art, every observation of his own in it, every hint he has caught from another. For the laws of beauty are the beauty of beauty, and give the mind the same or a higher joy than the sight of it gives the senses. The study of art is of high value to the growth of the intellect.

Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago, but it is put to better use.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

It is the eye which makes the horizon.

For every seeing soul, there are two absorbing facts - I, and the abyss.

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve.

Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds;the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints, which speak to the intelligent.

Great men are sincere.

Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail.

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.

The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

The soul comes from without into the human body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew… it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal.