Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house.

I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.

As every pool reflects the image of the sun, so every thought and thing restores us an image and creature of the supreme Good. Theuniverse is perforated by a million channels for his activity. All things mount and mount.

Consistency is the bugbear that frightens little minds.

Genius is the power to labor better and more availably. Deserve thy genius: exalt it.

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss. As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.

All life is a nap. The more naps you take the better.

The reality is more excellent than the report.

What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend.

The man, who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world.

Genius is saying what is in your heart, because it's in everyone's heart.

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.

Pride is handsome, economical; pride eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride.

The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.

Life is an ecstasy. Life is sweet as nitrous oxide.

If the vast and the spiritual are omitted, so are the practical and the moral.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Man moves in all modes, by legs of horses, by wings of winds, by steam, by gas of balloon, by electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to hunt the eagle in his own element.

When believers and unbelievers live in the same manner - I distrust the religion.

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?

Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out ofthe window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.

We wake from one dream into another dream.

A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school,preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not "studying a profession," for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.

The whole world is an omen and a sign. Why look so wistfully in a corner? Man is the Image of God. Why run after a ghost or a dream? The voice of divination resounds everywhere and runs to waste unheard, unregarded, as the mountains echo with the bleatings of cattle.

In politics and in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks.

When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are.

Only by obedience to his genius; only by the freest activity in the way constitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise beforea man, and lead him by the hand out of all the wards of the prison.

Echo waits with art and care And will the faults of song repair.

Neither you nor the world knows what you can do until you have tried.

Guard your own spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

As long as our people quote English standards they dwarf their own proportions.

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts, and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.

Talent for talent's sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us

The beautiful is never plentiful.

The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels.

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has noprescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.

Nature will not let us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds andwars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the abolition-convention, or the temperance-meeting, or the transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, "so hot? my little Sir.

Every word we speak is million-faced or convertible to an indefinite number of applications. If it were not so we could read no book. Your remark would only fit your case, not mine.

Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth.

This body, full of faults, Has yet one great quality: Whatever it encounters in this temporal life depends upon one's actions.

I--this thought which is called I--is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.