Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The delicate muses lose their head if their attention is once diverted. Perhaps if you were successful abroad in talking and dealing with men, you would not come back to your bookshelf and your task. When the spirit chooses you for its scribe to publish some commandment, it makes you odious to men and men odious to you, and you shall accept that loathsomeness with joy. The moth must fly to the lamp, and you must solve those questions though you die.

Whatever we think and say is wonderfully better for our spirits and trust in another mouth.

A few years ago, the liberal churches complained that the Calvinistic church denied to them the name of Christian. I think the complaint was confession; a religious church would not complain.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone. Society exists by chemical affinity, and not otherwise.

Astrology is astronomy brought down to Earth and applied toward the affairs of men.

No one suspects the days to be gods.

But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism.

Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

It takes a good deal of character to judge a person by his future instead of his past

When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.

Earth endures; Stars abide.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken.

We sometimes observe that spoiled children contract a habit of annoying quite wantonly those who have charge of them, and seem tomeasure their own sense of well-being, not by what they do, but by the degree of reaction they can cause. It is vain to get rid of them by not minding them: if purring and humming is not noticed, they squeal and screech; then if you chide and console them, they find the experiment succeeds, and they begin again. The child will sit in your arms contented if you do nothing. If you take a book and read, he commences hostile operations.

Money often costs too much, and power and pleasure are not cheap.

Pure by impure is not seen.

Surely nobody would be a charlatan, who could afford to be sincere.

We stand against fate, as children stand up against the wall in their father's house, and notch their height from year to year. But when the boy grows to a man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that wall and builds it new and bigger.

Wherever work is done, victory is attained.

Washington, where an insignificant individual may trespass on a nation's time.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look,begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary!

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel, was never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

The thing done avails, and not what is said about it.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

Fractures well cured make us more strong.

The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb.

To believe in luck ... is skepticism.

There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveler, who says anywhere but here.

I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints

The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.

He is only rich who owns the day. There is no king, rich man, fairy, or demon who possesses such power as that.

"Though many painters and sculptors talk glibly of "going in for photography," you will find that very few of them can ever make a picture by photography; they lack the science, technical knowledge, and above all the practice. Most people think they can play tennis, shoot, write novels, and photograph as well as any other person - until they try."

Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.

Persons are fine things, but they cost so much! for thee I must pay me.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.

The boxer's ring is the enjoyment of the part of society whose animal nature alone has been developed.

It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.

The student is to read history actively and not passively.

Heaven is large, and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude.

To a physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ.

Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; and science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,--I call it Dialectic,--which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true.

I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live.

You cannot do a kindness too soon.

War disorganizes, but it is to reorganize.