Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The hero sees that the event is ancillary: it must follow him.

Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, culture corrects the theory of success.

Let the amelioration in our laws of property proceed from the concession of the rich, not from the grasping of the poor. Let us understand that the equitable rule is, that no one should take more than his share, let him be ever so rich.

That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is cheerfulness, and courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations. Shall not the heart which has received so much, trust the Power by which it lives? May it not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul that has guided it so gently, and taught it so much, secure that the future will be worthy of the past?

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.

The Times are the masquerade of the eternities; trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise; the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history; the quarry out of which the genius of today is building up the Future.

God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

...as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to wound them.

It is true that the discerning intellect of the world is always much in advance of the creative, so that there are competent judges of the best book, and few writers of the best books.

Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.

Life is a series of surprises.

Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.

The days are made on a loom whereof the warp and woof are past and future time. They are majestically dressed, as if every god brought a thread to the skyey web.

I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist, after much exchange ofgood offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap.

There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.

Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.

We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in education.

Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Wild liberty breeds iron conscience; natures with great impulses have great resources, and return from far.

It is only as a man puts off from himself all external support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail.

Plant your DREAMS and miracles will grow.

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations

I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not to hold out his plate, as if I knew already.

We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are thevictims of these details, and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment.

At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her.

Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest

Today is a king in disguise.

I consider theology to be the rhetoric of morals.

No sensible person ever made an apology.

The light by which we see in this world comes out from the soul of the observer. Wherever any noble sentiment dwelt, it made the faces and houses around to shine. Nay, the powers of this busy brain are miraculous and illimitable.

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.

If we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last.

Two sorts of writers possess genius: those who think, and those who cause others to think.

The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.

He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

No rent-roll nor army-list can dignify skulking and dissimulation: and the first point of courtesy must always be truth, as really all the forms of good-breeding point that way.

It is not an arbitrary "decree of God," but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the children of men to live in to-day.

In spite of warnings, change rarely occurs until the status quo becomes more painful than change. People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.

Knowledge, Virtue, Power are the victories of man over his necessities, his march to the dominion of the world.

Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.