Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else.

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism, is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion, and making way for truth.

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

The simplest words,--we do not know what they mean except when we love and aspire.

It is one of the biggest blessing that you can be stupid with your true friends and behave like you shame to do elsewhere

This ennui, for which we Saxons had no name,--this word of France, has got a terrific significance. It shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light.

Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the fruit.

I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil.

So in writing, there is always a right word, and every other than that is wrong. There is no beauty in words except in their collocation. The effect of a fanciful word misplaced, is like that of a horn of exquisite polish growing on a human head.

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance and it straightens itself to the average tendency.

A woman's strength is the unresistible might of weakness.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

When I first open my eyes upon the morning meadows and look out upon the beautiful world, I thank God I am alive.

Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood.

Really, all things and persons are related to us, but according to our nature, they act on us not at once, but in succession, andwe are made aware of their presence one at a time. All persons, all things which we have known, are here present, and many more than we see; the world is full.

The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness.

Life is comic or pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only attend towhat addresses the senses.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

War, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels.

An orator or author is never successful till he has learned to make his words smaller than his ideas.

The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself.

The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.

The hero is not fed on sweets, Daily his own heart he eats; Chambers of the great are jails, And head-winds right for royal sails.

Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it

The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.

Pines a thousand years old. Every year they must go farther for them: they recede, like beavers and Indians, before the white man.

Whatever you do, you need courage.

Society always consists in the greatest part, of young and foolish persons.

The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

Beauty brings its own fancy price, for all that a man hath will he give for his love.

We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.

To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be madeby the reception of beautiful sentiments.

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay

Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; 'tis not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs so much.

The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not with observation,--a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of God,--he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.

Society, to be sure, does not like this very well; it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declares all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will retaliate.

In our large cities, the population is godless, materialized,--no bond, no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm. These are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites walking. How is it people manage to live on,--so aimless as they are? After their peppercorn aims are gained, it seems as if the lime in their bones alone held them together, and not any worthy purpose.

Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion,not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.

The sower may mistake and sow his peas crookedly; the peas make no mistake, but come up and show his line.

All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive atthe precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.

Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness,to grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so painting teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form, and as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms.

A bullet had found him, his blood ran out as he cried. No money could save him, so he laid down and died. Ooh, what a lucky man he was.