Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow-flies. Yet the powers of numbers cannot compute its enormous age,—lasting as space and time,—embosomed in time and space.

For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.

Art is a jealous mistress.

The rain comes when the wind calls.

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea.

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, andhave an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold.

But, if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from these heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime... But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. We're so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside.

Money is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or other commodity. It is so much warmth, so much bread.

My gentleman gives the law where he is; he will outpray saints in chapel, outgeneral veterans in the field, and outshine all courtesy in the hall. He is good company for pirates, and good with academicians; so that it is useless to fortify yourself against him; he has the private entrance to all minds, and I could as easily exclude myself, as him.

Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate; debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be foregone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most.

These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a god- like ease and power.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

If you want to be great and successful, choose people who are great and successful and walk side by side with them.

Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.

Let a man then know his worth and keep things under his feet.

This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.

People who wash much have a high mind about it, and talk down to those who wash little.

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

I do not hesitate to read. all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable-any real insight or broad human sentiment.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, there is no question of continuance. No inspired man ever asks this question, or condescends to these evidences. For the soul is true to itself, and the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the present, which is infinite, to a future which would be finite.

Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is our system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies, and hatreds of his competitors.

I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Palestine, Italy, Spain, and the Islands, - the Genius and creative Principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind.

If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?

You cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have served him, he at once puts you in debt by his magnanimity.

The shot heard round the world.

The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other matters [science] at other ends of the world.

Wherever there is power, there is age. Don't be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.

A mob cannot be a permanency: everybody's interest requires that it should not exist, and only justice satisfies all.

Friends should be like books, easy to find when you need them, but seldom used.

The conscious utterance of thought, by speech or action, to any end, is art.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

My tongue is prone to lose the way,Not so my pen, for in a letterWe have not better things to say,But surely put them better.

Line in Nature is not found; Unit and Universe are round.

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of nature.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

Within, I do not find wrinkles and used heart, but unspent youth.

There is a tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shatters rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order.

The energetic action of the times develops individualism, and the religious appear isolated. I esteem this a step in the right direction. Heaven deals with us on no representative system. Souls are not saved in bundles.

Our reliance on the physician is a kind of despair of ourselves.

People are timid and apologetic; they are no longer upright; they dare not say "I think," "I am," but quote some saint or sage. They are ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day.

Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of Nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

The finished man of the world must eat of every apple at once. He must hold his hatreds also at arm's length, and not remember spite. He has neither friends nor enemies, but values men only as channels of power.