Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,-must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know.

Chiefly the sea-shore has been the point of departure to knowledge, as to commerce. The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.

Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement.

Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.

In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.

Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show.

Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimneyside of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front.

I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.

Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.

The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.

Tis curious that we only believe as deeply as we live.

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time.

I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself anylonger for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall bethe happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that youshould. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust thatwhat is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moonwhatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, Iwill love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself byhypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truthwith me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own.

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

Genius has infused itself into nature. It indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favorable to the side of reason.

The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he!

We may be partial, but Fate is not.

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism.

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; - read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

Of all tools, an observatory is the most sublime. . . . What is so good in a college as an observatory? The sublime attaches to the door and to the first stair you ascent, that this is the road to the stars.

The art of sculpture is long ago perished to any real effect... it is the game of a rude and youthful people, and not the manly labour of a wise and spiritual nation.

I like people who can do things

The secret of poetry is never explained,— is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, and the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, and knows not that they are such. 'T is as easy as breath. 'T is like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, and none knows what it is.

Thou art to me a delicious torment.

To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs.

A philosopher must be more than a philosopher.

My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself,I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of the individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.

A new degree of intellectual power seems cheap at any price.

All good conversation, manners, and action come from a spontaneity which forgets usages and makes the moment great.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.

Of cheerfulness, or a good temper - the more it is spent, the more of it remains.

We go to Europe to be Americanized.

If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines; but meet on what common ground remains,--if onlythat the sun shines, and the rain rains for both; the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it the boundary mountains, on which the eye had fastened, have melted into air.

There was never anything that did not proceed from a thought.

Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man.

The poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him.

A strenuous soul hates cheap success. It is the ardor of the assailant that makes the vigor of the defendant.

The next best thing to saying a good thing yourself is to quote one.

When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the next man will appear.

The dead sleep in their moonless night; my business is with the living.

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

We must be our own before we can be another's.

All vigor is contagious.

There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.

As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.

A friend is a person who goes around saying nice things about you behind your back.