Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Man is made of the same atoms the world is, he shares the same impressions, predispositions, and destiny. When his mind is illuminated, when his heart is kind, he throws himself joyfully into the sublime order, and does, with knowledge, what the stones do by structure.

Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes.

Poverty demoralizes. A man in debt is so far a slave; and Wall-street thinks it easy for a millionaire to be a man of his word, aman of honor, but, that, in failing circumstances, no man can be relied on to keep his integrity.

All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, trebleor centuple use and meaning.

The moral sense reappears today with the same morning newness that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say there is no religion now. 'Tis like saying in rainy weather, There is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of its superlative effects.

A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

Do what you're afraid to do.

The "times," "the age" what is that, but a few profound persons and a few active persons who epitomize the times?

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.

Our globe discovers its bidden virtues, not only in heroes and arch-angels, but in gossips and nurses.

The public values the invention more than the inventor does. The inventor knows there is much more and better where this came from.

The ocean is a large drop; a drop is a small ocean.

The people are to be taken in very small doses.

And truly it demands something godlike in him who cast off the common motives of humanity and ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.

Health, south wind, books, old trees, a boat, a friend.

A right rule for a club would be,-Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic.

Only that is poetry which cleanses and mans me.

The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul

I have never met a man who was not my superior in some particular.

A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has his special Talent, and the mastery of Successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practiced.

Whilst the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property are very unequal. Oneman owns his clothes, and another owns a country.

If you act, you show character; if you sit still, you show it; if you sleep you show it.

The dice of God are always loaded.

A scholar is a man with his inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know.

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares when working to another aim.

The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.

The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds.

Hence, the less government we have, the better,--the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formalGovernment, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation.

Preaching is the expression of moral sentiments applied to the duties of life.

'Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth. Those laws do not stop where our eyes lose them, but push the same geometry and chemistry up into the invisible plane of social and rational life, so that, look where we will, in a boy's game, or in the strifes of races, a perfect reaction, a perpetual judgment keeps watch and ward.

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

If you love and serve man, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape remuneration.

Power educates the potentate.

New arts destroy the old.

We learn that God IS; that he is in me; and that all things are shadows of him.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine.

Economy does not consist in saving the coal, but in using the time while it burns.

My hours are peaceful centuries.

Every sunset brings the promise of a new dawn

All things are known to the soul.

Truth gathers itself spotless and unhurt after all our surrenders and concealments and partisanship; never hurt by the treachery or ruin of its best defenders, whether Luther, or William Penn, or St. Paul.

Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might.

History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by language and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived.

Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.

A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape,I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking.