Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances.

Good nature is stronger than tomahawks.

It is the dissenter, the theorist, the aspirant, who is quitting this ancient domain to embark on seas of adventure, who engages our interest. Omitting then for the present all notice of the stationary class, we shall find that the movement party divides itself into two classes, the actors, and the students.

A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Life is our dictionary.

Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture.

The constructive intellect [genius] produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature.

The true poem is the poet's mind.

There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours.

My joy in friends, those sacred people, is my consolation.

Shallow men believe in luck.

I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society. I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity.

Language is fossil Poetry.

Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.

There will always be in society certain persons who are mercuries of its approbation, and whose glance will at any time determinefor the curious their standing in the world. These are the chamberlains of the lesser gods. Accept their coldness as an omen of grace with the loftier deities, and allow them all their privilege.

Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors.

Sanity consists in not being subdued by your means. Fancy prices are paid for position, and for the culture of talent, but to thegrand interests, superficial success is of no account.

There are men who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations with them, and lead the activity of the human race.

Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate.

Every word was once a poem.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

We have more than we use.

The best political economy is the care and culture of men; for, in these crises, all are ruined except such as are proper individuals, capable of thought, and of new choice and the application of their talent to new labor.

It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no man's work but came by wide social labor, whena thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse.

Every advantage has its tax.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

The Englishman who has lost his fortune is said to have died of a broken heart.

As we refine, our checks become finer. If we rise to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form.

The bulk of mankind believe in two gods. They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion; but in mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come under another.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

The good judge is not he who does hair-splitting justice to every allegation, but who, aiming at substantial justice, rules something intelligible of the guidance of suitors.

Every man believes that he has greater possibilities.

How much more the seeker of abstract truth, who needs periods of isolation, and rapt concentration, and almost a going out of thebody to think!

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word politics ....?

He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted.

What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.

Extremes meet, and there is no better example than the naughtiness of humility.

A scholar does not wish to be always pumping his brains; he wants gossips.

Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm.

Hidden away in the inner nature of the real man is the law of his life, and someday he will discover it and consciously make use of it. He will heal himself, make himself happy and prosperous, and life in an entirely different world. For he will have discovered that life is from within and not from without.

In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is thereforeuseful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.

I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can walk but after the counsel of his own bosom.

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is what it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.

[on Thoreau:] For not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to truth itself.