Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

The moment our discourse rises above the ground-line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought.... This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation.

The only method to possess a buddy is always to be one.

The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom anpther's folly.

Genius seems to consistent merely in trueness of sight.

When fear enters the heart of a man at hearing the names of candidates and the reading of laws that are proposed, then is the State safe, but when these things are heard without regard, as above or below us, then is the Commonwealth sick or dead.

A good intention but fixed and resolute - bent on high and holy ends, we shall find means to them on every side and at every moment; and even obstacles and opposition will but make us "like the fabled specter-ships," which sail the fastest in the very teeth of the wind.

The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.

Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere as to expect poetry from this engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.

What goes on around you... compares little with what goes on inside you.

Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul.

In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

The only sin that we never forgive in each other is a difference in opinion.

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere, where it plays a part as indestructible as any other.

A man is a little thing whilst he works by and for himself, but, when he gives voice to the rules of love and justice, is godlike, his word is current in all countries; and all men, though his enemies, are made his friends and obey it as their own.

Knowledge is the antidote to fear. [especially as fear often stands for false evidence appearing real!]

The language of the street is always strong.

Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

Works of the intellect are great only by comparison with each other.

Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.

Enthusiasm is the engine of success.

Law of Contrariness: Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can. Having found them, we shall then hate them for it.

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.

We can only obey our own polarity.

A great man will find a great subject, or which is the same thing, make any subject great.

The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.

When I go into the garden with a spade and dig a bed I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.

In every company, there is not only the active and passive sex, but, in both men and women, a deeper and more important sex of mind, namely, the inventive or creative class of both men and women, and the uninventive or accepting class.

What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries!

An actually existing fly is more important than a possibly existing angel.

The lover of letters loves power too.

There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk too much.

Pay no heed to the average photographer's remarks upon "flat" and "weak" negatives. Probably he is flat, weak, stale, and unprofitable; your negative may be first-rate, and probably is if he does not approve of it.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Learn from it... tomorrow is a new day.

If the aristocrat is only valid in fashionable circles, and not with truckmen, he will never be a leader in fashion; and if the man of the people cannot speak on equal terms with the gentleman, so that the gentleman shall perceive that he is already really of his own order, he is not to be feared.

What potent blood hath modest May.

General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living.

The world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh.

O friend, never strike sail to a fear!

Do not speak of God much. After a very little conversation on the highest nature, thought deserts us and we run into formalism.