Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.

Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books.

Every person has his or her own vocation-talent is the call.

Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.

The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, "the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air of well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that escort us through life,--we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us.

A sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal powers, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us, and which we can love.

Whoever has had the experience of the moral sentiment cannot choose but believe in unlimited power. Each pulse from that heart isan oath from the Most High. I know not what the word sublime means, if it be not the intimations, in this infant, of a terrific force.

Don't set out to teach theism from your natural history... You spoil both.

I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore, With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.

In strict science, all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining forthe metaphysical foundation of this elysian temple? Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are.

People seem sheathed in their tough organization.

The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals. Strength enters just as much as the moral element prevails.

It is the property of the religious spirit to be the most refining of all influences. No external advantages, no culture of the tastes, no habit of command, no association with the elegant, or even depth of affection, can bestow that delicacy and that grandeur of bearing which belong only to the mind accustomed to celestial conversation,--all else is but gilt and cosmetics, beside this, as expressed in every look and gesture.

Poetry being ... when we look from the center outward.

Each religious sect has its own physiognomy. The Methodists have acquired a face; the Quakers, a face; the nuns, a face. An Englishman will pick out a dissenter by his manners.

I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity.

It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history.

The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed, by, as a loss of power.

There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest good men.

The genius of reading and of gardening are antagonistic, like resinous and vitreous electricity. One is concentrative in sparks and shocks: the other is diffuse strength; so that each disqualifies its workman for the other's duties.

Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold it's great proportions.

Coolness and absence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities.

Walking has the best value as gymnastics of the mind.

We know that madness belongs to love,--what power to paint a vile object in hues of heaven.

I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives.

Continual failure is a road to success - if you have the strength to go on.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

Most people, who have quit smoking, have had at least one unsuccessful try in the past. It is not important how many times you try to quit. The only important thing is, that eventually you stay quit

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

Go out of the house to see the moon, and't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.

A man passes for that he is worth. What he is engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his fortunes, in letters of light. Concealment avails him nothing; boasting nothing. There is confession in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the grasp of hands.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

All high beauty has a moral element in it.

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

The masses have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

No man has a right perception of any truth, who has not been reacted on by it, so as to be ready to be its martyr.

In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form; only some irresponsible shadow; oftener some monied corporation, or some dangler, who hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But through every clause and part of speech of the right book I meet the eyes of the most determined men; his force and terror inundate every word: the commas and dashes are alive; so that the writing is athletic and nimble,--can go far and live long.

Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.

The ancestor of every action is thought; when we understand that we begin to comprehend that our world is governed by thought and that everything without had its counterpart originally within the mind.

In America and Europe, the nomadism is of trade and curiosity.

Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered.

The vanishing, volatile froth of the present which any shadow will alter, any thought blow away, any event annihilate, is every moment converted into the adamantine.

But a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech, not a man.

Souls are not saved in bundles.

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence.

We call the beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good and the heartlessness of the true.

As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain, the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall eagerly convert more than we now possess into means and powers, when we shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds.

How much finer things are in composition than alone.