Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

A fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world.

Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

People only see what they are prepared to see. If you look for what is good and what you can be grateful for you will find it everywhere.

But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends.

The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.

In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, - seven or eight ancestors at least, and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.

Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners.

He who would be a great soul in the future, must be a great soul now.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once come up with a man's limitations, it is all over with him. Has he talents? has heenterprise? has he knowledge? It boots not. Infinitely alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care not if you never see it again.

As Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it.

I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.

My good hoe as it bites the ground revenges my wrongs, and I have less lust to bite my enemies. In the smoothing the rough hillocks, I smooth my temper.

He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.

Where there is no vision a people perish.

We imperatively require a perception of and a homage to beauty in our companions. Other virtues are in request in the field and workyard, but a certain degree of taste is not to be spared in those we sit with.

Each man reserves to himself alone the right of being tedious.

The Bhagavad-Gita is an empire of thought and in its philosophical teachings Krishna has all the attributes of the full-fledged montheistic deity and at the same time the attributes of the Upanisadic absolute.

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree.

Fate is unpenetrated causes.

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.

The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.

Who loses a day loses life.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature.

Let the river roll which way it will, cities will rise on its banks.

Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, the intimated purpose, express character.

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: it was somebody's name, or he happened to be there at right time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring. Any absorbing passion has the effect to deliver from the little coils and cares of every day: 'tis the heat which sets our human atoms spinning, overcomes the friction of crossing thresholds, and first addresses in society, and gives us a good start and speed, easy to continue, when once it is begun.

As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man.

We do not want actions, but men; not a chemical drop of water, but rain; the spirit that sheds and showers actions, countless, endless actions.

Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.

Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

One more fagot of these adamantine bandages is the new science of Statistics.

A nation never falls but by suicide.

The whole value of the dime is in knowing what to do with it.

A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.

Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men.

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

For the world was built in order around the atoms march in tune; Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder, The sun obeys them, and the moon.

Do the thing and you will have the power.

What is man born for but to be a Reformer, a Remaker of what man has made? A renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good? Imitating that great Nature which embossoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, with every breath a new life?

Say thank you! I want to hear you say it now. Out loud. 'Thank you.' You're saying thank you because your faith is so strong that you don't doubt that whatever the problem, you'll get through it. You're saying thank you because you know that even in the eye of the storm, God has put a rainbow in the clouds. You're saying thank you because you know there's no problem created that can compare to the Creator of all things. Say thank you!

I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.

Romeo, of dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more,than Juliet,--than Romeo.

All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of the universal being.