Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.

though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, so we buy ice cream.

The experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet

In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.

There is in nature a parallel unity which corresponds to the unity in the mind and makes it available. This methodizing mind meets no resistance in its attempts. The scattered blocks, with which it strives to form a symmetrical structure, fit. This design following after finds with joy that like design went before. Not only man puts things in a row, but things belong in a row.

Solitary converse with nature; for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods!

Poverty consist in feeling poor.

The secret in education lies in respecting the student.

The goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons, that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subserves;such as we see in the sexual attraction.

Give the slave the least elevation of religious sentiment, and he is not slave: you are the slave: he not only in his humility feels his superiority, feels that much deplored condition of his to be a fading trifle, but he makes you feel it too. He is the master.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Nature: She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough for literature. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men are born to write. The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and peach-stone: his vocation is to be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair. Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model, and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think.

Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is due to the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it

Imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.

In the country, without any interference from the law, the agricultural life favors the permanence of families.

Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success.

The poor and the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. "Blessed be nothing," and "The worse things are, the better they are," are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.

Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,--what ample borrowers of eternity they are!

In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight.

He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.

We live ruins amid ruins.

I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.

But the mark of American merit in painting, in sculpture, in poetry, in fiction, in eloquence, seems to be a certain grace withoutgrandeur, and itself not new but derivative; a vase of fair outline, but empty,--which whoso sees, may fill with what wit and character is in him, but which does not, like the charged cloud, overflow with terrible beauty, and emit lightnings on all beholders.

Society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him; he has become tediously good insome particular but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result.

There is always a best way of doing everything.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.

Intellect is void of affection and sees an object as it stands in the light of science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the individual, floats over its own personality, and regards it as a fact, and not as I and mine.

The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.

As a man thinketh, so is he, and as a man chooseth, so is he.

Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.

This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life,never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoodsman, which all men relish.

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.

We boil at different degrees.

One man pins me to the wall, while with another I walk among the stars

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.

It is always a practical difficulty with clubs to regulate the laws of election so as to exclude peremptorily every social nuisance. Nobody wishes bad manners. We must have loyalty and character.

Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.

Character teaches above our wills.

Our life seems not present, so much as prospective; not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast- flowingvigor.

Some of the sweetest hours in life, in retrospect will be found to have been spent with books.