Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

There is no better way to exercise the imagination than the study of the law.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Immitation is suicide.

Discontent is want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will.

The affirmative of affirmatives... is love.

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be made public, which you have come at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity.

I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity. All men, all things, the state, the church, yea the friends of the heart are phantasms and unreal beside the sanctuary of the heart. With so much awe, with so much fear, let it be respected.

Religion is as effectively destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.

In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men.

We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.

Oxford is a little aristocracy in itself, numerous and dignified enough to rank with other estates in the realm; and where fame and secular promotion are to be had for study, and in a direction which has the unanimous respect of all cultivated nations.

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him?

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept or if you have slept or if you have head ache or sciatica or leprosy or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace and not pollute the morning.

Henceforth, please God, forever I forego the yolk of men's opinions. I will be light-hearted as a bird and live with God. I find him in the bottom of my heart, and I hear continually his voice therein.

The advantage in education is always with those children who slip up into life without being objects of notice.

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. ... In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.

Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam.

Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question.

Power is what they want, not candy-power to execute their design, power to give legs and feet, form and actuality to their thought; which, to a clear-sighted man, appears the end for which the universe exists, and all its resources might be well applied.

Revolutions go not backward.

The common experience is, that the man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. Then he is part of the machine he moves; the man is lost.

The value of a dollar is to buy just things; a dollar goes on increasing in value with all the genius and all the virtue of the world. A dollar in a university is worth more than a dollar in a jail; in a temperate, schooled, law-abiding community than in some sink of crime, where dice, knives, and arsenic are in constant play.

Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

There is a persuasion in the soul of man that he is here for cause, that he was put down in this place by the Creator to do the work for which he inspires him, that thus he is an overmatch for all antagonists that could combine against him.

For each new morning with its light, For rest and shelter of the night, For health and food, for love and friends, For everything Thy goodness sends.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say; even though we may repeat the words ever so often.

Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, "If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?"

Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.

What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love.

Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody.

Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.

Vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last,--a long way leading nowhere.

The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself and whatever science or art or course of action he engages in reacts upon and illuminates the recesses of his own mind. Thus friends seem to be only mirrors to draw out and explain to us ourselves; and that which draws us nearer our fellow man, is, that the deep Heart in one, answers the deep Heart in another, - that we find we have (a common Nature) - one life which runs through all individuals, and which is indeed Divine.

It is sublime to think and say of another, I need never meet, or speak, or write to him: we need not reinforce ourselves, or send tokens of remembrance; I rely on him as on myself: if he did thus and thus, I know it was right.

The secret of success in education is respecting the students.

The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think less of his compositions. His best communication to our mind is to teach us to despise all he has done.

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose.

If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.