Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Let us not be too much acquainted. I would have a man enter his house through a hall filled with heroic and sacred sculptures, that he might not want the hint of tranquillity and self-poise.

Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy.

There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:-never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them written in his hand.

The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes.

If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to conceal, his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into that as into any which he publishes.

Play out the game, act well your part, and if the gods have blundered, we will not.

Allow yourself to trust joy and embrace it. You will find you dance with everything.

One can never truly savor success until first tasting adversity.

When at last in a race a new principle appears, an idea--that conserves it; ideas only save races.

There is health in table talk and nursery play. We must wear old shoes and have aunts and cousins.

The education of the will is the object of our existence.

Quotation confesses inferiority.

Beside all the moral benefit which we may expect from the farmer's profession, when a man enters it considerately, this promised the conquering of the soil, plenty, and beyond this, the adorning of the country with every advantage and ornament which labor, ingenuity, and affection for a man's home, could suggest.

The secret of success lies never in the amount of money, but in the relation of income to outgo.

a good reader makes a good book

The life of truth is cold.

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.

Will is the measure of power. To a great genius there must be a great will. If the thought is not a lamp to the will, does not proceed to an act, the wise are imbecile. He alone is strong and happy who has a will. The rest are herds. He uses; they are used. He is of the Maker; they are of the Made. Will is always miraculous, being the presence of God to men. When it appears in a man he is a hero, and all metaphysics are at fault.

If I have renounced the search of truth, if I have come into the port of some pretending dogmatism, some new church, some Schelling or Cousin, I have died to all use of these new events that are born out of prolific time into multitude of life every hour. I am as bankrupt to whom brilliant opportunities offer in vain. He has just foreclosed his freedom, tied his hands, locked himself up and given the key to another to keep.

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist

Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.

In my dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead me nothing; but as much soul as I have avails. If I am wilful, he sets his will against mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degradation of beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will, and act for the soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves with me.

The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.

The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, reallyshow very little relation to each other; never meet and measure each other: one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves.

The horseman serves the horse, The neat-herd serves the neat, The merchant serves the purse, The eater serves his meat; 'Tis the day of the chattel, Web to weave, and corn to grind, Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind.

A cheerful, intelligent face is the end of culture.

Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead. The injury to faith throttles the preacher; and the goodliest of institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticulate voice.

Power and speed be hands and feet.

Money is of no value; it cannot spend itself. All depends on the skill of the spender.

Every man finds a sanction for his simplest claims and deeds, in decisions of his own mind, which he calls Truth and Holiness.

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant.

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

You cannot sincerely try to help another without helping yourself

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

Words are alive. Cut them and they bleed.

Women, as most susceptible, are the best index of the coming hour.

To live the greatest number of good hours is wisdom.

It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters, that whoever can speak can sing. So, probably, every man is eloquent once in his life. Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or

Though your views are in straight antagonism to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume that you are saying precisely thatwhich all think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt.

We sell the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent pleasure.

The house praises the carpenter.

Women see through Claude Lorraines.

There are books... which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences.

For, rightly, every man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and, whilst I fancied I was criticising him, I was censuring orrather terminating my own soul.

Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer.