Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.

It is the same among the men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can never be grasped? In persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible?

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men - that is genius... Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist... What I must do, is all that concerns me; not what the people think... Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing, but the triumph of principles.

Things bring their own philosophy with them, that is, prudence.

People are very inclined to set moral standards for others.

Go cherish your soul; express companions; set your habits to a life of solitude; then will the faculties rise fair and full within.

Personal beauty is then first charming and itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions, and not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

Nature never rhymes her children, nor makes two men alike. When we see a great man, we fancy a resemblance to some historical person, and predict the sequel of his character and fortune, a result which he is sure to disappoint. None will ever solve the problem of his character according to our prejudice, but only in his high unprecedented way.

To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself.

Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us day by day and cost us nothing.

The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

Man's actions are the picture book of his creeds.

Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.

Every friend whom not thy fantastic will but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly in endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.

The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be low, as that we should be low; for we musthave a society.

London is the epitome of our times, and the Rome of to-day.

A little praise goes a great ways.

Let us make education brave and preventive. Politics is an afterwork, a poor patching. We are always a little late... We shall one day learn to supercede politics by education... We must begin higher up, namely in Education.

She shows us only surfaces, but she is million-fathoms deep.

That which we are, we are all the while teaching, not voluntarily, but involuntarily.

If you want a friend you need to be a friend.

Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes.

The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics.

Let no one honour me with tears, or bury me with lamentation. Why? Because I fly hither and thither, living in the mouths of me.

I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me and the heart apoints.

Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.

If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and chief men of each race. It is to have the sea, by voyaging; to visit the mountains, Niagara, the Nile, the desert, Rome, Paris, Constantinople: to see galleries, libraries, arsenals, manufactories.

Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.

Behind every individual closes organization; before him opens liberty,--the Better, the Best. The first and worse races are dead.The second and imperfect races are dying out, or remain for the maturing of the higher. In the latest race, in man, every generosity, every new perception, the love and praise he extorts from his fellows, are certificates of advance out of fate into freedom.

And what avails it that science has come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities, but the incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?

By the irresistible maturing of the general mind, the Christian traditions have lost their hold.

Though I am weak, yet God, when prayed, Cannot withhold his conquering aid.

In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac.

Education should be as broad as man.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine. The simplicity of nature is not that which may be easily read but is inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be made.

Practice radical humility." He (or she)who masters the art of humility cannot be humiliated.

The world still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle with Shakspeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with equal inspiration. For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right is more beautiful than private affection; and love is compatible with universal wisdom.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

A man in a cave or in a camp, a nomad, will die with no more estate than the wolf or the horse leaves.

A man is the prisoner of his power. A topical memory makes him an almanac; a talent for debate, disputant; skill to get money makes him a miser, that is, a beggar. Culture reduces these inflammations by invoking the aid of other powers against the dominant talent, and by appealing to the rank of powers. It watches success.

Good churches are not built by bad men; at least, there must be probity and enthusiasm somewhere in the society. These minsters were neither built nor filled by atheists.

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

Be silly. Be honest. Be kind.