Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

It is with a good book as it is with good company.

They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear.

You cannot institute, without peril of charlatanism.

Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

When a natural king becomes a titular king, every body is pleased and satisfied.

Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

The kitchen clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnæan classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe.

But it is impossible that the creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed,through which the creator passes.

In the vaunted works of Art, The master-stroke is Nature's part.

The question is whether [suicide] is the way out, or the way in.

Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

We read often with as much talent as we write.

A Frenchman may possibly be clean; an Englishman is conscientiously clean.

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions. Men are too coarsely made for the delicacy of beautiful carriage and customs. It is not quite sufficient to good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

Books are for nothing but to inspire

Hitch your wagon to a star.

One of our statesmen said, "The curse of this country is eloquent men."

The first lesson of history is that evil is good.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

What we have learned from other becomes our own reflection.

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, and conjures up with inarticulate speech, is to-morrow the vociferated result of public opinion, and the day after is the character of nations.

Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.

Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

The persons who constitute the natural aristocracy, are not found in the actual aristocracy, or, only on its edge; as the chemicalenergy of the spectrum is found to be greatest just outside of the spectrum.

Very idle is all curiosity concerning other people's estimate of us, and all fear of remaining unknown is not less so.

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.

Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million fresh particulars.

Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast

Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music, but clearest and most permanent, in words.

When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me,--when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?

The multitude of the sick shall not make us deny the existence of health.

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

There is a good ear, in some men, that draws supplies to virtue out of very indifferent nutriment.

If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.

The last change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air.

For a great nature, it is a happiness to escape a religious training; religion of character is so apt to be invaded.

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.

Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.

The present is an edifice which God cannot rebuild.

When God lets loose a great thinker on this planet, then all things are at risk. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned to-morrow; nor any literary reputation or the so-called eternal names of fame that many not be refused and condemned.

All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power.

Every man who would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground.

Greatness is a property for which no man gets credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged.

The whole of what we know is a system of compensation. Every defect in one manner is made up in another. Every suffering is rewarded; every sacrifice is made up; every debt is paid.