Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears.

At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles.

The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.

Do not say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders, so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

If any mention was made of homicide, madness, adultery, and intolerable tortures, we would let the church-bells ring louder, the church-organ swell its peal and drown the hideous sound. The sugar they raised was excellent: nobody tasted blood in it.

Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast.

The moral sense is always supported by the permanent interest of the parties. Else, I know not how, in our world, any good would ever get done.

Why should all virtue work in one and the same way? Why should all give dollars? It is very inconvenient to us country folk, and we do not think any good will come of it. We have not dollars; merchants have; let them give them. Farmers will give corn; poets will sing; women will sew; laborers will lend a hand; the children will bring flowers.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

The highest proof of civility is that the whole public action of the State is directed on securing the greatest good of the greatest number.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

The highest Beauty should be plain set.

Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you, if you are great.

THE POET A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray: They overleapt the horizon's edge, Searched with Apollo's privilege; Through man, and woman, and sea, and star, Saw the dance of nature forward far; Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so.

Money often costs too much.

Every man is an infinitely repelling orb, and holds his individual being on that condition.

When it comes to divide an estate, the politest men quarrel.

The frost which kills the harvest of a year saves the harvest of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust.

The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.

The Americans have no faith, they rely on the power of a dollar; they are deaf to sentiment.

Let us take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the divine circuits.

It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervadedand dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognised itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula.

Performing on a stool, we've got a sight to make you drool, seven virgins and a mule, keep it cool, keep it cool.

What we call results are beginnings.

Nature is a rag-merchant, who works up every shred and ort and end into new creations; like a good chemist, whom I found, the other day, in his laboratory, converting his old shirts into pure white sugar.

Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished.

Some of your griefs you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you've endured From evils that never arrived.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Right is more beautiful than private affection, and is compatible with universal wisdom.

Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far.

There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right.

Want is a growing giant whom the coat of have was never large enough to cover.

You must let go of a thing for a new one to come to you.

Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent. All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone.

Do not believe that possibly you can escape the reward of your action.

Men should take their knowledge from the Sun, the Moon and the Stars.

Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.

Unhappily, no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.

By going one step further back in thought, discordant opinions are reconciled by being seen to be two extremes of one principle, and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still higher vision.

Every man is grave alone.

A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty, as of a displaced and unfurnished member. He is to be dressed in arts and institutions, as well as in body garments. Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must; but coop up most men and you undo them.

Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.

The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral sentiment.

Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds: Men live on the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which yet they never enter, and with their hand on the doorlatch they die outside.

The cruelest foe is a masked benefactor. The wars which make history so dreary have served the cause of truth and virtue.

We say love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage around his eyes. Blind - yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love for finding what he seeks, and only that.

Black men built the railroads, not blue eyes.