Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Give me truths for I am weary of the surfaces.

The ragged cliff has thousand faces in a thousand hours.

I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.

Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being?

Egotism is a kind of buckram that gives momentary strength and concentration to men, and seems to be much used in Nature for fabrics in which local and spasmodic energy is required.

Nature is no sentimentalist, - does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons.

Freedom is not the right to live as we please, but the right to find how we ought to live in order to fulfill our potential.

I feel the same truth how often in my trivial conversation with my neighbours, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us.

All promise outruns performance.

The height, the deity of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude.

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.

Europe extends to the Alleghenies; America lies beyond.

When a man becomes cultivated, he develops a new respect for who he is. This causes him to be ashamed of his past identification of himself and others according to things, i.e. property.

But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive orbrute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

Every young man is prone to be misled by the suggestions of his own ill-founded ambition which he mistakes for the promptings of asecret genius, and thence dreams of unrivaled greatness.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment, I could never stay there five minutes.

To a dull mind all of nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

It is bad enough that our geniuses cannot do anything useful, but it is worse that no man is fit for society who has fine traits.He is admired at a distance, but he cannot come near without appearing a cripple.

Numbers serve to discipline rhetoric. Without them it is too easy to follow flights of fancy, to ignore the world as it is and to remold it nearer the heart's desire.

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional.

Man is the end of nature; nothing so easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he; no moss, no lichen is so easilyborn; and he takes along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of society and condition extempore, as an army encamps in a desert, and where all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation, and for love.

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes.

The world exists for the education of each man.

God never jests with us, and will not compromise the end of nature, by permitting any inconsequence in its procession.

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our own spontaneous expression with good humored inflexibility whether the whole cry of voices is on the other side.

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

An expense of ends to means is fate;Morganization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits.

Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions.

The secret of fortune is joy in our hands.

Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.

The sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanity's.

England, an old and exhausted island, must one day be contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her children.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

Harmony of aim, not identity of conclusion, is the secret of sympathetic life.

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood. . . .

Prosperity is something the businessmen created for politicians to take credit for

Literature is eavesdropping.

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom.

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.

The field cannot be seen from within the field.

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the Chancellors of God.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.