Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

No man ever came to an experience which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward!

The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.

Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.

Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or a mollusk, and isolated it-which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation.

it in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower.

Let not the author eat up the man, so that he shall be all balcony and no house.

When the gods come among men, they are not known.

'Tis a good rule in every journey to provide some piece of liberal study to rescue the hours which bad weather, bad company, and taverns steal from the best economist.

Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

It is wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the frontier. You would think they found it under a pine-stump. With it comes a Latin grammar, and one of those tow-head boys has written a hymn on Sunday. Now let colleges, now let senates take heed! for here is one who, opening these fine tastes on the basis of the pioneer's iron constitution, will gather all their laurels in his strong hands.

To help the young soul, to add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame; to redeem defeat by new thought and firm action, this, though not easy, is the work of divine men.

We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universalthat error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.

Nature encourages no looseness; pardons no errors.

Spartans, stoics, heroes, saints and gods use short and positive speech.

Nature hates calculators.

We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments into their heaven, and so fully engage us, that we take no thought forthe morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own.

Concentration is the secret of srength.

People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint.

There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be turned tomorrow.

We love force and we care very little how it is exhibited.

The world always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us.

There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

I like sayers of no better than I like sayers of yes.

The civility of the world has reached that pitch that their more moral genius is becoming indispensable, and the quality of this race is to be honored for itself.

Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?

Meet your failure nobly, and it will not differ from success.

I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable.

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

Each mind has its own method. A true man never acquires after college rules.

Where is he who seeing a thousand men useless and unhappy, and making the whole region forlorn by their inaction, and conscious himself of possessing the faculty they want, does not hear his call to go and be their king?

Don't hang a dismal picture on the wall, and do not daub with sables and glooms in your conversation. Don't be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don't bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions. Nerve us with incessant affirmatives. Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. When that is spoken which has a right to be spoken, the chatter and the criticism will stop. Set down nothing that will not help somebody.

When it is darkest, we can see the stars.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society. ... Society can never prosper, but must always be bankrupt, until every man does that which he was created to do.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.

The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

Some people are born very far from home.

Society is infected with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom no public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach; the contradictors and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight.

Wisdom will never let us stand with any man on an unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited for some better sympathy or intimacy to come. But whence and when: Tomorrow will be like today. Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live.

The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.

Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows.

The days come and go but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.

Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibal will be a cannibal, of the crusades a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.

The only joy in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine.

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom which cannot help itself.