Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Nature is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We acquire the strength we have overcome.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to bewritten, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.

If we live truly, we shall see truly.

Poets should be law-givers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead the civil code, and the day's work.

I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.

That man is idle who can do something better.

A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.

But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power.

Men of character are the conscience of the society to which they belong.

Men are respectable only as they respect.

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.

After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk.

It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt to themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form.

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.

When duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.

The world is young: the former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world.

Genius, even, as it is the greatest good, is he greatest harm.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals

Postpone not your life.

The music that can deepest reach and cure all ill is cordial speech.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

Lovers should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion and meanness.

When we see a special reformer we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your own virtue? Is virtue piecemeal?

Government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party; the rich and the strong can better take care of themselves.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.

Music is the poor man's Parnassus.

There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding.

Every novel is a debtor to Homer.

It is better to suffer injustice than to do it.

In all conversation between two persons, tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God.

We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.

Nature is upheld by antagonism.

Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair.

No matter what your work, let it be your own. No matter what your occupation, let what you are doing be organic. Let it be in your bones. In this way, you will open the door by which the affluence of heaven and earth shall stream into you.

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

Nothing great ever happened without enthusiasm.

My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.

He takes men out of time and makes them feel eternity.

I appeal now to the convictions of the communicants, and ask such persons whether they have not been occasionally conscious of a painful confusion of thought between the worship due to God and the commemoration due to Christ.

For, the advantages which fashion values, are plants which thrive in very confined localities, in a few streets, namely. Out of this precinct, they go for nothing; are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue.

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.

Health is the first muse, and sleep is the condition to produce it.

Most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means.