Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Though we love goodness and not stealing, yet also we love freedom and not preaching.

Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay.

The terrors of the child are quite reasonable, and add to his loveliness; for his utter ignorance and weakness, and his enchanting indignation on such a small basis of capital compel every bystander to take his part.

The world is his who has money to go over it.

No society can ever be so large as one man.

The hero is suffered to be himself.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues.

Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.

The Nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature.

Action is the process whereby what is not fully formed passes into expressive consciousness.

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun.

If the black man is feeble and not important to the existing races, not on a parity with the best race, the black man must serve,and be exterminated. But if the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization; for the sake of that element, no wrong nor strength nor circumstance can hurt him: he will survive and play his part. So now, the arrival in the world of such men as Toussaint, and the Haytian heroes, or of the leaders of their race in Barbadoes and Jamaica, outweighs in good omen all the English and American humanity.

The mark of a man of the world is absence of pretension.

Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew, and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.

The great man is not convulsible or tormentable; events pass over him without much impression.

In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.

The power of a man increases steadily by continuing in one direction.

I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.

Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.

My giant goes with me wherever I go.

Logic is the procession or proportionate unfolding of the intuition; but its virtue is as silent method; the moment it would appear as propositions, and have a separate value, it is worthless.

The way to mend the bad world is to create the right world.

I am not so foolish as to declaim against forms. Forms are as essential as bodies; but to exalt particular forms, to adhere to oneform a moment after it is outgrown, is unreasonable, and it is alien to the spirit of Christ.

The only reward of virtue is virtue.

The merit of those who fill a space in the world's history, who are borne forward, as it were, by the weight of thousands whom they lead, shed a perfume less sweet than do the sacrifices of private virtue.

I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to seserve that you should.

Each of us sees in others what we carry in our own hearts.

Look out! Behind you!

I always seem to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities.

Enlarge not thy destiny, said the oracle: endeavor not to do more than is given thee in charge.

When he has seen, that it is not his, nor any man's, but it is the soul which made the world, and that it is all accessible to him, he will know that he, as its minister, may rightfully hold all things subordinate and answerable to it.

Vivacity, leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed to be nice in choosing. We must fetch the pump with dirty water, if clean cannot be had.

If we shall take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures.

There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes.

We don't grow old. When we cease to grow, we become old.

Life is a search after power; and this is an element with which the world is so saturated,-there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged,-that no honest seeking goes unrewarded.

We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and... Nature, the sun and moon, the animals, the water and stones, which should be their toys.

Nothing will supply the want of sunshine to peaches, and, to make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom. Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished. The joy of the spirit indicates its strength. All healthy, things are sweet-tempered. Genius works in sport, and goodness smiles to the last.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.

Make youself necessary to someone.

The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.

Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.

We owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the seeming gang of gypsies and peddlars.

Science corrects the old creeds, sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile catechisms, and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses yet it does not surprise the moral sentiment that was older and awaited expectant these larger insights.

The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.

The instinct of the people is right.