Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

We must be courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.

Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks he is free.

A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein.

What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, and yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.

When the spirit is not master of the world, then it is its dupe.

No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love.

The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.

The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.

A deep man believes that the evil eye can whither, the heart's blessing can heal, and that love can overcome all odds.

The intellect searches out the Absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God, and without the colors of affection. The intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive activity of the one generates the exclusive activity of the other. There is something unfriendly in each to the other, but they are like the alternate periods of feeding and working in animals; each prepares and will be followed by the other.

Where the banana grows man is sensual and cruel.

Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty, that it, has been taken for it.

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit, in every work of art; since the author of it was not misled by anything short- livedor local, but abode by real and abiding traits.

I now require this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide.

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.

Ennui shortens life, and bereaves the day of its light.

A weed is a plant we've found no use for yet.

That which we call character is a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a familiar or genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart.

But every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us is convertible by intellect into wholesome force. Fate is unpenetrated causes.

Therefore all just persons are satisfied with their own praise. They refuse to explain themselves, and are content that new actions should do them that office. They believe that we communicate without speech, and above speech, and that no right action of ours is quite unaffecting to our friends, at whatever distance; for the influence of action is not to be measured by miles.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven depending on whether they compare it to something better and so feel disappointed and bitter or something worse and so feel relieved and grateful.

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit.

Truth is always present; it only needs to lift the iron lids of the mind's eye to read its oracles.

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as two sides of an algebraic equation.

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.

Envy is ignorance, Imitation is Suicide.

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

My doom and my strength is to be solitary.

The orator is thereby an orator that keeps his feet ever on a fact.

We expect a great man to be a good reader.

As long as civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

He only is rich who owns the day.

It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.

In the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a property in a work of art, which belonged to all who could behold it.

I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

I believe it is the conviction of the purest men, that the net amount of man and man does not much vary. Each is incomparably superior to his companion in some faculty. His want of skill in other directions, has added to his fitness for his own work.

Every individual nature has its own beauty. One is struck in every company, at every fireside, with the riches of nature, when he hears so many new tones, all musical, sees in each person original manners, which have a proper and peculiar charm, and reads new expressions of face. He perceives that nature has laid for each the foundations of a divine building, if the soul will build thereon.

One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye; it transcends speech; it is the bodily symbol of identity.

Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.

Power dwells with cheerfulness.

The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.