Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Or whipping its rough surface for a trout.

Never utter the truism but live it among men.

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Though we travel the world over to find beauty, we must carry it with us or we find it not . . . The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great difference in beholders.

No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.

We must learn the language of facts. The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the senses.

The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.

When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity.

In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present.

The victories of character are instant, and victories for all.

The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition from that which is representable to the senses, to that which is not.

We must have kings, we must have nobles; nature is always providing such in every society; only let us have the real instead of the titular. In every society some are born to rule, and some to advise. The chief is the chief all the world over, only not his cap and plume. It is only this dislike of the pretender which makes men sometimes unjust to the true and finished man.

If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.

Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses, and violets, and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love.

The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his confidence in the attributes of the intellect.

Man is endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical, compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect remains.

Only to youth will spring be spring.

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

If I quake, what matters it what I quake at? Our proper vice takes form in one or another shape, according to the sex, age, or temperament of the person, and, if we are capable of fear, will readily find terrors.

He who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the plants, the waters, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments - is the rich and royal man.

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I'm not afraid of falling into my inkpot.

Men do not believe in the power of education. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We renounce all high aims.

Teach the children! It is painting in fresco.

Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.

In certain men digestion and sex absorb the vital force, and the stronger these are, the individual is so much weaker. The more ofthese drones perish, the better for the hive.

In dreams we are true poets; we create the persons of the drama; we give them appropriate figures faces, costumes; they are perfect in their organs, attitudes, manners; moreover they speak after their own characters, not ours; and we listen with surprise to what they say.

Free should be the scholar - free and brave.

All great natures delight in stability; all great men find eternity affirmed in the very promise of their faculties.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

Every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment.

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

Character wants room; must not be crowded on by persons, nor be judged from glimpses got in the press of affairs, or on few occasions. It needs perspective, as a great building.

If it costs ten years, and ten to recover the general prosperity, the destruction of the South is worth so much.

I suppose an entire cabinet of shells would be an expression of the whole human mind; a Flora of the whole globe would be so likewise, or a history of beasts; or a painting of all the aspects of the clouds. Everything is significant.

I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction.

All the great ages have been ages of belief.

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

Man is the dwarf of himself.

The surest poison is time.

Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes.

Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a stone; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing.

One single idea may have greater weight than all the men, animals, and machines for a century.

We live by our imagination, our admirations, and our sentiments.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

So . . . I feel in regard to this aged England . . . pressed upon by transitions of trade and . . . competing populations,-I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering that she has seen dark days before;-indeed, with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that, in storm of battle and calamity, she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon.

It is a tie between men to have read the same book.

Be lord of a day, through wisdom and justice, and you can put up your history books.

Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startles out wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.