Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

...What torments of pain have you endured that haven't as yet arrived? and may never!

So far as a person thinks; they are free.

A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad.

We hear eagerly every thought and word quoted from an intellectual man. But in his presence our own mind is roused to activity, and we forget very fast what he says.

Convert life into truth.

The proof of a high education is the ability to speak about complex matters as simply as possible.

All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

The subject is said to have the property of making dull men eloquent.

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world.

Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you, or quietly drops you.

Every mind has a new compass, a new direction of its own, differencing its genius and aim from every other mind.--We call this specialty the bias of each individual. And none of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

Teach that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.

Remarkable trait in the American Character is the union, not very infrequent, of Yankee cleverness with spiritualism.

Everything in nature goes by law, and not by luck.

The Jews believed Jerusalem to be the centre. I have seen a kratometric chart designed to show that the city of Philadelphia was in the same thermic belt, and, by inference, in the same belt of empire, as the cities of Athens, Rome, and London. It was drawn by a patriotic Philadelphian, and was examined with pleasure, under his showing, by the inhabitants of Chestnut Street. But, when carried to Charleston, to New Orleans, and to Boston, it somehow failed to convince the ingenious scholars of all those capitals.

My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock should find the time in my face.

All my hurts my garden spade can heal.

I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.

God had infinite time to give us.... He cut it up into a near succession of new mornings, and, with each, therefore, a new idea, new inventions, and new applications.

Let none presume to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo or Socrates by village scales.

Teaching is the perpetual end and office of all things. Teaching, instruction is the main design that shines through the sky and earth.

Best masters for the young writer and speaker are the fault- finding brothers and sisters at home who will not spare him, but willpick and cavil, and tell the odious truth.

Friends are like spaghetti, they should stick together. The only way to have a friend is to be one.

What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man?

Every man is actually weak, and apparently strong. To himself, he seems weak; to others, formidable.

The intellect,-that is miraculous! Who has it, has the talisman: his skin and bones, though they were of the color of night, are transparent, and the everlasting stars shine through, with attractive beams.

The Yankee is one who, if he once gets his teeth set on a thing, all creation can't make him let go.

Let us replace sentimentalism by realism and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern.

I am sure of this, that by going much alone a man will get more of a noble courage in thought and word than from all the wisdom that is in books.

The soul is not born; it does not die; it was not produced from anyone… Unborn, eternal, it is not slain, though the body is slain.

All writing comes by the grace of God.

It behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss.

Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say on both sides,and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line.

If a man carefully examine his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead. Such a creature is probably immortal.

If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in the instructions of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade,--the droll disguises only magnifying and enhancing a real element, and forcing it on our distinct notice,--we shall catch many hints that will broaden and lighten into knowledge of the secret of nature.

Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.

What I need is someone who will make me do what I can.

God hid the whole world in thy heart.

The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.

Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.

Wherever there is failure, there is some giddiness, some superstition about luck, some step omitted, which, Nature never pardons.

How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or mother's life?

We are disgusted by gossip; yet it is of importance to keep the angels in their proprieties.

The age of puberty is a crisis in the age of man worth studying. It is the passage from the unconscious to the conscious; from thesleep of passions to their rage.

What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

All necessary truth is its own evidence.