Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

An individual has a healthy personality to the exact degree to which they have the propensity to look for the good in every situation.

A man is related to all nature.

[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.

The flowers talk when the wind blows over them.

What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?

If the gatherer gathers too-much, Nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates, monopolies and exceptions.

No doubt, to a man of sense, travel offers advantages. As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man. A foreign country is a point of comparison, wherefrom to judge his own.

Beauty without expression is boring.

The genius is a genius by the first look he casts on any object. Is his eye creative? Does he not rest in angles and colors, but beholds the design,--he will presently undervalue the actual object.

The life of labor does not make men, but drudges.

The first point of courtesy must always be truth.

God knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door; but whenever used in strictness and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point at original energy.

The soul knows no persons.

To Be is to live with God.

Life is a boundless privilege, and when you pay for your ticket, and get into the car, you have no guess what good company you shall find there.

Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.

Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence; without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal Cause.

Everything good is on the highway.

Nature is saturated with Deity.

Every natural power exhilarates; a true talent delights the possessor first.

Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grandand immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence.

The charm of fine manners is music and sculpture and picture to many who do not pretend to appreciation of these arts.

The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it... ''Beware of me,'' it says, ''but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands.

The passages of Shakespeare that we most prize were never quoted until within this century.

Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

Sorrow makes us all children again.

Life is in short cycles or periods; we are quickly tired, but we have rapid rallies. A man is spent by his work, starved, prostrate; he will not lift his hand to save his life; he can never think more. He sinks into deep sleep and wakes with renewed youth, with hope, courage, fertile in resources, and keen for daring adventure.

Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions; the surest poison is time. This cup which nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science; especially it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.

You must elect your work; you shall take what your brains can, and drop all the rest. Only so can that amount of vital force accumulate which can make the step from knowing to doing. No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken. It is a step out of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind.

Every man beholds his human condition with a degree of melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man, imprisonedin mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming events.

I am Defeated all the time, yet to Victory I am born.

A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

There are men too superior to be seen except by a few, as there are notes too high for the scale of most ears.

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man's crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.

He that rides his hobby gently must always give way to him that rides his hobby hard.

In like manner the effect of every action is measured by the depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds. The great man knew not that he was great. It took a century or two for that fact to appear. What he did, he did, he did because he must; it was the most natural thing in the world, and grew out of the circumstances of the moment.

The eloquence of one stimulates all the rest, some up to the speaking-point, and all others to a degree that makes them good receivers and conductors, and they avenge themselves for their enforced silence by increased loquacity on their return.

Conversation is an evanescent relation,--no more.

Not in his goals but in his transitions, man is great.

An eminent teacher of girls said, "the idea of a girl's education, is, whatever qualifies them for going to Europe.

The astronomers said, 'Give us matter and a little motion and we will construct the universe. It is not enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces.' ... There is no end to the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through every atom of every ball.

The reason why all men honor love is because it looks up, and not down; aspires and not despairs.