Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

By God, I will not obey this filthy enactment!

There comes a period of the imagination to each--a later youth--the power of beauty, the power of looks, of poetry.

The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly.

What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.

In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended.

Only those books come down which deserve to last . All the gilt edges, vellum and morocco, all the presentation copies to all the libraries will not preserve a book in circulation beyond its intrinsic date.

The idea of God ends in a paltry Methodist meeting-house.

A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no luster as you turn it in your hand, until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

The primary wisdom is intuition. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their origin.

Go, speed the stars of Thought On to their shining goals; - The sower scatters broad his seed, The wheat thou strew'st be souls.

[Gratitude is] the cheerfulness of wisdom.

A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

What is there of the divine in a load of brick? What ... in a barber shop? ... Much. All.

There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

Prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good, is vicious.

Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood?

Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future.

The population of the world is a conditional population; these are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, gases, animals, and morals: the best that could yet live; there shall be a better, please God.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

All forms of government symbolize an immortal government, common to all dynasties and independent of numbers, perfect where two men exist, perfect where there is only one man.

A part of fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in his soul.

When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with His presence.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.

English history is aristocracy with the doors open. Who has courage and faculty, let him come in.

Your work should be in praise of what you love.

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.

Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to- morrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them.

Half a man's wisdom goes with his courage.

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.

The highest praise we can attribute to any writer, painter, sculptor, builder, is, that he actually possessed the thought or feeling with which he has inspired us.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.

All the fairy tales of Aladdin, or the invisible Gyges, or the talisman that opens kings' palaces, or the enchanted halls underground or in the sea, are only fictions to indicated the one miracle of intellectual enlargement.

I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws, than with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the world, but at shorter distances, the senses are despotic.

Of all wit's uses, the main one is to live well with who has none.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride.

It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation.

All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis,--is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There and Then, and introduce in its place the Here and Now.

The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy.

Men in all ways are better than they seem.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.

The maxim of courts is that manner is power.

If you take in a lie, you must take in all that belongs to it.