Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

In science we have to consider two things: power and circumstance.

You need someone who can inspire you to be what you know you can be

The Gods we worship write their names on our faces; be sure of that. And a man will worship something ... That which dominates will determine his life and character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

There is no calamity that right words will not begin to redress

We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads, and an abstract of the codes of nations would be an abstract of the common conscience.

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.

Of Nature itself upon the soul; the sunrise, the haze of autumn, the winter starlight seem interlocutors; the prevailing sense is that of an exposition in poetry; a high discourse, the voice of the speaker seems to breathe as much from the landscape as from his own breast; it is Nature communing with the seer.

We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are ... punished by fear.

A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.

Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?

If the race is good, so is the place.

How we hate this solemn Ego that accompanies the learned, like a double, wherever he goes.

The men who come on the stage at one period are all found to be related to each other. Certain ideas are in the air.

People say law but they mean wealth.

Each philosopher, each bard, each actor has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself.

Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.

The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the muse of history will utter oracles as never to those who do not respect themselves.

But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation.

In daily life what distinguishes the master is the using those materials he has, instead of looking about for what are more renowned, or what others have used well.

We thirst for approbation, yet cannot forgive the approver.

As I walked in the woods I felt what I often feel that nothing can befall me in life, no calamity, no disgrace (leaving me my eyes) to which Nature will not offer a sweet consolation. Standing on the bare ground with my head bathed by the blithe air, & uplifted into the infinite space, I become happy in my universal relations. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign & accidental. I am the heir of uncontained beauty and power.

Nothing can work damage to me except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me and never am a real sufferer except by my own fault.

We forget ourselves and our destinies in health, and the chief use of temporary sickness is to remind us of these concerns.

A healthy soul stands united with the Just and the True, as the magnet arranges itself with the pole, so that he stands to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt them and the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun, journeys towards that person. He is thus the medium of the highest influence to all who are not on the same level.

A man in debt is so far a slave.

If a man sits down to think, he is immediately asked if he has a headache.

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?

The world is all outside, it has no inside.

There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society.

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

It is one soul which animates all men.

Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. The whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth.

The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.

You think me the child of circumstance; I make my circumstance.

The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over.

Earth proudly wears the Parthenon As the best gem upon her zone.

The lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to hermother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.

Experience is the only teacher, and we get his lesson indifferently in any school.

We do what we can, and then make a theory to prove our performance the best.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.

A man is a hero, not because he is braver than anyone else, but because he is brave for 10 minutes longer.

The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claim to praise.

Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.