Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.

The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going

The affections cannot keep their youth any more than men.

The shows of the day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, andthe like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit, and not give the bread of life.

The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are playing in the sky.

There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that other can, and by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship so signal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us?

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

It is the duty of men to judge men only by their actions. Our faculties furnish us with no means of arriving at the motive, the character, the secret self. We call the tree good from its fruits, and the man, from his works.

For, when men shall meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a shower of stars, clothed with thoughts, with deeds, with accomplishments, it should be the festival of nature which all things announce. Of such friendship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other things are symbols of love. Those relations to the best men, which, at one time, we reckoned the romances of youth, become, in the progress of character, the most solid enjoyment.

Always pay; for first or last you must pay your entire debt.

Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other.

It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize or accept another's dogmatism.

I can believe a miracle because I can raise my own arm. I can believe a miracle because I can remember. I can believe it because I can speak and be understood by you.

Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take a single step that would bring them there.

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.

Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements?

Truth is too simple for us: we do not like those who unmask our illusions.

We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River, when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and a negative pole.

All poets have signalized their consciousness of rare moments when they were superior to themselves, -when a light, a freedom, a power came to them which lifted them to performances far better than they could reach at other times.

A house is made with walls and beams; a home is built with love and dreams.

Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can.

Every time you wink the stars move.

Coal is a portable climate.

Rhodora! If the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.

Women have a less accurate measure of time than men; there is a clock in Adam, none in Eve.

Happy will the house be in which the relationships are formed from character.

The case wouldn't be overweight if you didn't have so many shoes. How many do you really need? This pair, for example, I swear you never even wore them.

Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole.

Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each other up to a high standard. The habit of meeting well-read and knowing men teaches the art of omission and selection.

Sleep is not, death is not; Who seem to die Live. House you were born in, Friends of your spring-time, old man and young maid, Day's toil and it's guerdon, They are all vanishing, Fleeing to fables, Cannot be moored

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.

Our expenses are all for conformity.

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

All great men come out of the middle classes.

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.

Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed.

Every stoic was a stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

The President proclaims war, and those Senators who dissent are not those who know better, but those who can afford to...Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.