Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The love that you withhold is the pain that you carry.

Every action has an ancestor of a thought.

If you would lift me up, you've got to be on higher ground.

It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.

The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine alike of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all the members

Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative.

Commonsense is the wick of the candle.

Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men, and institutions, rootedlike oak-trees to the centre, round which all arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres; but any particle may suddenly become the centre of the movement, and compel the system to gyrate round it, as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato, or Paul, does forever.

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once come up with a man's limitations, it is all over with him.

Never try to make anyone like you: you know, and God knows, that one of you is enough.

Imitation cannot go above its model.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young.

Our health is our sound relation to external objects; our sympathy with external being.

The finest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby - so helpless and so ridiculous.

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.

He in whom the love of truth predominates . . . submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion; but he is a candidate for truth . . . and respects the highest law of his being.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

There is nothing capricious in nature and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feel it.

There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.

The best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mob.

Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partizans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

America means opportunity, freedom, power.

What is civilization? I answer, the power of good women.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made--no matter how indirectly--to numbers, proclamation is then and there made, that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet, enveloping presence, who shall dare to come in?

Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist. Every thing must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition, to understand any thing rightly.

Treat your friend as a spectacle.

Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creepinto a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution.

America is another name for opportunity.

A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be saidto have arrived at self-possession.

Science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge.

Religion must always be a crab fruit; it cannot be grafted, and keep its wild beauty.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character.

It is God in you that responds to God without, or affirms his own words trembling on the lips of another.

So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self.

Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself.

Any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.

When a happy person comes into the room, it is as if another candle has been lit.

An empire is an immense egotism.

Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers.

Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods.

It must be that when God speaketh, he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole.Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, - means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it,-one as much as another. All things are disolved to ther center by thier cause.