Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician.

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.

I am present at the sowing of the seed of the world. With a geometry of sunbeams, the soul lays the foundations of nature.

The genius of the Platonists, is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books.

Self sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow.

Not the sun or summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight.

The idiot, the Indian, the child and unschooled farmer's boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own.

The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand.

Men of extraordinary success, in their honest moments, have always sung, "Not unto us, not unto us." According to the faith of their times, they have built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, which found in them an unobstructed channel; and the wonders of which they were the visible conductors seemed to their eye their deed.

Life itself is ... a sleep within a sleep.

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same.

Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth.

We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not posses.

There is, in all great poets, a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise.

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide; nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily punished-by fear...be honest with a man and you have no fear. Try to deceive and the relationship deteriorates.

I am primarily engaged to myself to be a public servant of all the gods, to demonstrate to all men that there is intelligence andgood will at the heart of all things, and even higher and yet higher leadings. These are my engagements; how can your law further or hinder me in what I shall do to men?

The only money of God is God. He pays never with any thing less, or any thing else.

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?

When I bought my farm, I did not know what a bargain I had in the bluebirds, daffodils and thrushes; as little did I know what sublime mornings and sunsets I was buying.

My own mind is the direct revelation which I have from God and far least liable to mistake in telling his will of any revelation.

Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

Flowers are the earth laughing.

The philanthropists inquire whether Transcendentalism does not mean sloth: they had as lief hear that their friend is dead, as that he is a Transcendentalist; for then is he paralyzed, and can never do anything for humanity.

We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid hallucinations, and especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with, and all are tripped up first or last. But the mighty mother, who had been so sly with us, as if she felt she owed us some indemnity, insinuates into the Pandora box of marriage some deep and serious benefits, and some great joys.

It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree.

The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitants of the northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics.

We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young anddodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of beat.

Life has a way of demanding that you live it.

The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal.

Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health. The great will not condescend to take anything seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were the building of cities, or the eradication of old and foolish churches and nations, which have cumbered the earth long thousands of years.

Things have their laws as well as men, and things refuse to be trifled with.

When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; ... he learns his ignorance, is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill.

Our prayers are prophets.

Ah, if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches.

Not gold, but only man can make a people great and strong; men who, for truth and honor's sake, stand fast and suffer long.

When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.

Life is to be lived, not controlled.

A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune.

He is a good man who can receive a gift well.

We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim.

A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short.

The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite.

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.