Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.

We surround ourselves with the true image of ourselves.

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed,--because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.

The charm of the best courages is that they are inventions, inspirations, flashes of genius.

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.

Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthily into nature.

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.

We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.

He who loves the bristle of bayonets only sees in the glitter what beforehand he feels in his heart. It is avarice and hatred; it is that quivering lip, that cold, hating eye, which built magazines and powder-houses.

A good form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science on the subject; and a beautiful face sets twenty hearts in palpitation, prior to all consideration of the mechanical proportions of the features and head.

When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hang it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune.

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?

This very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

A man often pays dear for a small frugality.

We ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or noble moments that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.

Would we codify the laws that should reign in households, and whose daily transgression annoys and mortifies us, and degrades our household life, we must adorn every day with sacrifices. Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

We resent all criticism which denies us anything that lies in our line of advance.

I unsettle all things.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins

The field cannot be well seen from within the field. The astronomer must have his diameter of the earth's orbit as a base to fix the parallax of any other star

Housekeeping is not beautiful; it cheers and raises neither the husband, the wife, nor the child; neither the host nor the guest;it oppresses women. A house kept to the end of prudence is laborious without joy; a house kept to the end of display is impossible to all but a few women, and their success is dearly bought.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Don't be a cynic, and bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions. Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. Set down nothing that will help somebody.

Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish,--and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are notequal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit.

The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.

I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old.

A man's library is a sort of harem.

Happy the man who never puts on a face, but receives every visitor with that countenance he has on.

I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope that it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.

Every reform was once a private opinion.

Of the Shaker society, it was formerly a sort of proverb in the country, that they always sent the devil to market.

The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of thehuman mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstacy.

We put our love where we have put our labor.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate thier virtue or vice by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath ever moment....One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zsig zag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficent distance and it straightens itslef to the average tendency.

The gentleman is a man of truth.

Of all debts, men are least willing to pay their taxes; what a satire this is on government.

All successful men have agreed in one thing -- they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.

American mind a wilderness of opportunities.

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

New York is a sucked orange.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

Throughout the ages there have always been those who have been willing to go beyond the norms and reach for that unknown and distant star.

The less government we have the better.

All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.

Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the toughfibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.