Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.

Wherever a man commits a crime, God finds a witness. Every secret crime has its reporter.

My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.

Love is like a hunter, who cares not for the game when once caught, which he may have pursued with the most intense and breathless eagerness. Love is strongest in pursuit; friendship in possession.

Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; If I cannot carry forests on my back, Neither can you crack a nut.

The populace drags down the gods to their own level.

Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him.

Wherever there is power there is age.

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is taste. Others have the same love in such success that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art.

Shakespeare possesses the power of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets. His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is uppermost in his mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together, by subtle spiritual connection. We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet.

The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, andthe country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,--travel a whole day together,--looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor.

A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes uppermost, and, because he says every thing, saying, at last, something good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is nothing whimsical or fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.

Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.

Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.

Improve your spare moments and they will become the brightest gems in your life.

Skill to do comes of doing.

We animate what we can see, and we see only what we animate.

The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility? The ocean is everywhere the same, but it has no character until seen with the shore or the ship.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.

To this military attitude of the soul we give the name of Heroism... It is a self-trust which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will.

You may regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer, but if you cannot, mind your own business.

Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.

A man of good sense but of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as often as he went there, said to me; 'that he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on.

Wisdom is not found with those who dwell at their ease; rather nature, when she adds brain, adds difficulty.

A man should not be a silkworm; nor a nation a tent of caterpillars.

Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it well and serenely

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem.

If you have something to say, you will be given the power to say it.

I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him.

Power is in nature the essential measure of right.

The divine gift is ever the instant life, which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for recomposition.

In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.

Sometimes we receive the power to say yes to life. Then peace enters us and makes us whole.

Don't be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things?

A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of souls in the direction of Right and Necessity. It is the air which all intellects inhale and exhale, and it is the wind which blows the worlds into order and orbit.

All diseases run into one, old age.

If you follow the suburban fashion in building a sumptuous- looking house for a little money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap, dear house.

There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; then is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever lose the benefit.

The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not happy in company, cannot find any word in his memory that will fit the occasion; all his information is a little impertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the conversation occasions for the introduction of what he has to say. The favorites of society are able men, and of more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly fill the hour and the company, contended and contenting.

Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.

Thoughts rule the world.

Good as is discourse, silence is better and shames it.

All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal.

The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and largercircles, and that without end.