Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong . . . . Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment.

I honor health as the first Muse.

A friend is the hope of the heart.

Sanity is very rare; every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness.

Wisdom is infused into every form.

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.

The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions.

If the East loves infinity, the West delights in boundaries.

Was never secret history but birds tell it in the bowers.

He is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor; and how to give access to themasterpieces of art and nature, is the problem of civilization.

Steam was till the other day the devil which we dreaded. Every pot made by any human potter or brazier had a hole in its cover, to let off the enemy, lest he should lift pot and roof and carry the house away.

Difficulties exist to be surmounted.

I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults overthe moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub.

Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible, and divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to bepainted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood, or oil, or meal, or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax; and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains; and the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word,--these eat up the hours.

He who travels in search of something which he has not got, travels away from himself and grows old even in youth among old things.

We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic.

All the world loves a lover.

Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.

Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his countenance, he may abolish all considerations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the world.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

The best of life is conversation, and the greatest success is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people.

Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe.

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know

Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.

Don't trust children with edge tools. Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!

The difference between talent and genius is in the direction of the current: in genius, it is from within outward; in talent from without inward.

The world is filled with the proverbs and acts and winkings of a base prudence, which is a devotion to matter, as if we possessedno other faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear; a prudence which adores the Rule of Three, which never subscribes, which never gives, which seldom lends, and asks but one question of any project,--Will it bake bread?

In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.

Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces, which expose the whole movement.

Build therefore your own world.

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers.

The man for whom the law exists - the man of forms, the conservative - is a tame man.

Society does not love its unmaskers.

There the great Planter plants Of fruitful worlds the grain, And with a million spells enchants The souls that walk in pain.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.

We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly are.

All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light, is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie,--an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed.

The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and sotheir house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them.

The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.

Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day.

Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you: build, therefore, your own world.

A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. A fop of fields is no better than his brother on Broadway.