Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread.

Common sense is as rare as genius.

The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.

But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms.

Body cannot teach wisdom; God only.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.

Society has no bribe for me.

A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.

As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience.

He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.

I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each ofthese works an act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken; that act or step is the spiritual act; all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousand times.

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.

You must treat the days respectfully, you must be a day yourself, and not interrogate it like a college professor.

Man carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore he is the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the end it shall ripen into truth, and you shall know why you believe.

Great country, diminutive minds. America is formless, has no terrible and no beautiful condensation.

Society always consists, in greatest part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of the courts and statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age.

Thus grows up fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.

Live in the sunshine.

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.

All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt.

Who can . . . guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us.

Whatever limits us we call fate.

If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak.

An answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask.

Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so we are.

I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.

Eyes...They speak all languages.

Spoons and skimmers you can be undistinguishably together; but vases and statues require each a pedestal for itself.

Read proudly--put the duty of being read invariably on the author. If he is not read, whose fault is it? I am quite ready to be charmed, but I shall not make-believe I am charmed.

Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow. Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect. The louder he talked of his honesty, the quicker we counted the silverware.

It does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes never so long.

We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you. Dante was very badcompany, and was never invited to dinner.

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

Every great man is unique.

There are some men above grief and some men below it.

[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand.

If we must accept fate we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.