Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

When It's Darkest, Men See the Stars.

I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough from being that truth, which yet he quite newly and inevitably suggests to us. If I seek it in him, I shall not find it.

The first wealth is health.

Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men together again after ten years, and if the presence of some penetrating and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confession of insanities would come up!

Outside among your fellows, among strangers, you must preserve appearances, a hundred things you cannot do; but inside, the terrible freedom.

Persecution readily knits friendship between its victims.

Perception is a mirror not a fact. And what I look on is my state of mind, reflected outward.

A man becomes what he thinks about most of the time

Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.

The mass of men worry themselves into nameless graves while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality.

The powers of the Soul are commensurate with its needs.

The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being.

He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.

Popularity is for dolls.

The connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still real, and the explication must be not less magnificent.

Let a stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear.

I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,--at the end of life just ready to be born,--affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment.

The inmost in due time becomes the outmost.

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

Science in England, in America, is jealous of theory, hates the name of love and moral purpose. There's revenge for this humanity.What manner of man does science make? The boy is not attracted. He says, I do not wish to be such a kind of man as my professor is.

The foundations of a person are not in matter but in spirit.

To wade in marshes and sea margins is the destiny of certain bird, and they are so accurately made for this that they are imprisoned in those places. Each animal out of its habitat would starve. To the physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk, and a dancer could not exchange functions. And thus we are victims of adaptation.

The unsaid part is the best of every discourse.

To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy is to set your own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances instead of being conditioned by them.

Hume's doctrine was that the circumstances vary, the amount of happiness does not; that the beggar cracking fleas in the sunshine under a hedge, and the duke rolling by in his chariot, the girl equipped for her first ball, and the orator returning triumphant from the debate, had different means, but the same quantity of pleasant excitement.

Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence.

Manners make the fortune of the ambitious youth.

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. (Despite) all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether... The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration.

The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritualcreation, and not in augmenting animal existence. Nor is the man enriched, in repeating the old experiments of animal sensation; nor unless through new powers and ascending pleasures he knows himself by the actual experience of higher good to be already on the way to the highest.

Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that astonish.

A man complained that on his way home to dinner he had every day to pass through that long field of his neighbor's. I advised him to buy it, and it would never seem long again.

Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the converting of the sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their design.

Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.

We have feudal governments in a commercial age. It would be but an easy extension of our commercial system, to pay a private emperor a fee for services, as we pay an architect, an engineer, or a lawyer. If any man has talent for righting wrong, for administering difficult affairs, for counselling poor farmers how to turn their estates to good husbandry, for combining a hundred private enterprises to a general benefit, let him in the county- town, or in Court-street, put up his sign-board, Mr. Smith, Governor, Mr. Johnson, Working king.

When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him.

There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.

Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear in season, that he is born into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self- collected, and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude of his behaviour.

The borrowing is often honest enough, and comes of magnanimity and stoutness. A great man quotes bravely and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good.

We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn ahundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life.

The basis of good manners is self-reliance.

The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,--faint copies of an invisible archetype.

When a man becomes a conformist, he is sacrificing the richness of independent thinking.

The only prudence in life is concentration.

The good rain, like a bad preacher, does not know when to leave off.

Far off, men swell, bully, and threaten; bring them hand to hand, and they are feeble folk.

Belief and love,--a believing love will relieve us of a vast load of care. O my brothers, God exists. There is a soul at the centre of nature, and over the will of every man, so that none of us can wrong the universe.