Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim... The details, the prose of nature, he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendour.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year. He only is right who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded by worry, fret and anxiety. Finish every day, and be done with it. You have done what you could.

There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball where everyone hides his real character, then reveals it by hiding

The leaves are falling, falling as from way off, as though far gardens withered in the skies; they are falling with denying gestures. And in the nights the heavy earth is falling from all the stars down into loneliness. We all are falling. This hand falls. And look at others: it is in them all. And yet there is one who holds this falling endlessly gently in his hands.

The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite.

A woman should always challenge our respect, and never move our compassion.

When some external event raises your spirits and you think good days are preparing for you, do not believe it. It can never be so. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.[What is a sorrow? A feeling whose benefits have not yet been discovered]

A person seldom falls sick but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die.

Faith makes us, and not we it; and faith makes its own forms.

The earth is a machine which yields almost gratuitous service to every application of intellect. Every plant is a manufacturer of soil. In the stomach of the plant development begins. The tree can draw on the whole air, the whole earth, on all the rolling main. The plant is all suction-pipe,--imbibing from the ground by its root, from the air by its leaves, with all its might.

Everything in our world, even a drop of dew, is a microcosm of the universe.

Knowledge is the only elegance.

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

Very few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior quadruped organization. We call these millions men; but they are not yet men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all the music that can be brought to disengage him.

Pride eradicates all vices but itself.

It never was in the power of any man or any community to call the arts into being. They come to serve his actual wants, never to please his fancy.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant-and this commonly on the ground of other reading and hearing-that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect.

The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships.

Love not the flower they pluck and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?

In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem.

But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought from age to age.

Congratulate yourself if you have done something strange, extravagant and broken the monotony.

The goof man, in dealing with his people, taxes them with luxury.

When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth, his eye is as clear as the heavens. When he has base ends, and speaks falsely, the eye is muddy, and sometimes asquint.

All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle

A skilful man reads his dreams for his selfknowledge; yet not the details, but the quality.

We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, andfind a new and fervent sense; as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say, "the italics are ours.

Almost every man we meet requires some civility; requires to be humored; - he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me.

Love is our highest word and the synonym of God.

Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are. It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the very rich, in a true scale would be found very indigent and ragged.

The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear, alike in the poverty of the obscurest farm, and in the miscellany of metropolitan life, and that these few are alone to be regarded,--the escape from all false ties; courage to be what we are; and love what is simple and beautiful; independence and cheerful relation, these are the essentials,--these, and the wish to serve,--to add somewhat to the well-being of men.

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant

It is very odd that Nature should be so unscrupulous. She is no saint . . .

Whenever a mind is simple and receives an old wisdom, old things pass away,--means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it,--one as much as another.

A man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would not have them rule him.

The world globes itself in a drop of dew.

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.

We know more from nature than we can at will communicate.

The soul refuses limits and always affirms an optimism, never a pessimism.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time.

You do not get power so that you can go out and do things, you go out and do things and you will get the power

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.