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What has been done in the world - the works of genius - cost nothing. There is no painful effort, but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought. Shakespeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In our definitions, we grope after the spiritual by describing it as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is real; that law which executes itself, which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not existing. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Yet some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, and wherever the vein of thought reaches down into the profound, there is no danger from vanity. Solemn friends will warn them of the danger of the head's being turned by the flourish of trumpets, but they can afford to smile. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am old, yet I look at wise men and see that I am very young. I look over those stars yonder, and into the myriads of the aspirant and ordered souls, and see I am a stranger and a youth and have yet my spurs to win. Too ridiculous are these airs of age. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We imperatively require a perception of and a homage to beauty in our companions. Other virtues are in request in the field and workyard, but a certain degree of taste is not to be spared in those we sit with. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,
what ample borrowers of eternity they are! -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It takes a good deal of character to judge a person by his future instead of his past -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The gentleman is a man of truth. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
And of poetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavours after the unattainable. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, andthe country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,
travel a whole day together,
looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
For, whom the Muses smile upon,
And touch with soft persuasion,
His words like a storm-wind can bring
Terror and beauty on their wing;
In his every syllable
Lurketh nature veritable. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every roof is agreeable to the eye, until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Moderation in all things, especially moderation. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is creative reading as well as creative writing. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Flowers are the earth laughing. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art is evidence of our most creative moment. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Break the monotony. Do something strange and extravagant! -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if he will wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius exists there also, but will not answer a call of a committee of the House of Commons. It is rare, precious, eccentric, and darkling. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no person can sincerely try to help another without helping him or herself. Serve and you shall be served. If you love and serve people, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape the remuneration. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
But it is impossible that the creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed,through which the creator passes. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue ... -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Accuracy is essential to beauty. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Allow yourself to trust joy and embrace it. You will find you dance with everything. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,
at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The poor and the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. "Blessed be nothing," and "The worse things are, the better they are," are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
No nation has produced anything like his equal. There is no quality in the human mind, there is no class of topics, there is no region of thought, in which he has not soared or descended, and none in which he has not said the commanding word. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The foremost watchman on the peak announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken, and the phrase will be th fittest, most musical, and the unerring voice of the world for that time. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In order for one to learn the important lessons of life, one must first overcome a fear each day. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a persuasion in the soul of man that he is here for cause, that he was put down in this place by the Creator to do the work for which he inspires him, that thus he is an overmatch for all antagonists that could combine against him. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first point of courtesy must always be truth. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Are you not scared by seeing that the gypsies are more attractive to us than the apostles? -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A self-denial, no less austere than the saint's, is demanded of the scholar. He must worship truth, and forgo all things for that,and choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby augmented. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy? -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In these divine pleasures permitted to me of walks in the June night under moon and stars, I can put my life as a fact before me and stand aloof from its honor and shame. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone. Society exists by chemical affinity, and not otherwise. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is a rag-merchant, who works up every shred and ort and end into new creations; like a good chemist, whom I found, the other day, in his laboratory, converting his old shirts into pure white sugar. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A cheerful, intelligent face is the end of culture. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not gold but only men can makeA people great and strong;Men who for truth and honors sakeStand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep,Who dare while others flyThey build a nations pillars deepAnd lift them to the sky. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend's house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The unsaid part is the best of every discourse. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I honor health as the first muse, and sleep as the condition of health. Sleep benefits mainly by the sound health it produces; incidentally also by dreams, into whose farrago a divine lesson is sometimes slipped. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is indispensable to inspiration? ... sound sleep and the provocation of a good book or a companion. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We want a ship in these billows we inhabit. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to hermother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We love force and we care very little how it is exhibited. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fear, when your friends say to you what you have done well, and say it through; but when they stand with uncertain timid looks of respect and half-dislike, and must suspend their judgement for years to come, you may begin to hope. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,
is not that mine? His wit,
if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these [158] have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces we are disconcerted. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; then is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever lose the benefit. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man of good sense but of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as often as he went there, said to me; 'that he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Artist always has the masters in his eyes. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ruin or blank, that we see when we look at nature is in our own eye ... Love is as much its demand, as perception. Indeed neither can be perfect without the other. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Difference of opinion is the one crime which kings never forgive. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The foundations of a person are not in matter but in spirit. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him [H.D. Thoreau]. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The frost which kills the harvest of a year saves the harvest of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The population of the world is a conditional population; these are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, gases, animals, and morals: the best that could yet live; there shall be a better, please God. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Solitude is impractical, and society fatal. We must keep our head in the one and our hands in the other. The conditions are met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The genius of life is friendly to the noble, and, in the dark, brings them friends from far. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,
his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,
fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
To know one life has breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The cardinal virtue of a teacher [is] to protect the pupil from his own influence. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The craft of the merchant is this bringing a thing where it abounds to where it is costly. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If your friend has displeased you, you shall not sit down to consider it, for he has already lost all memory of the passage, and has doubled his power to serve you, and, ere you can rise up again, will burden you with blessings. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Foolish people ask you, when you speak what they do not wish to hear, "How do you know it is the truth, and not an error of your own?" We know the truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A scholar is a man with his inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
What you are shouts at me so loudly that I can't hear a word you say. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never sought to ask, I never knew:
But, in my simple ignorance suppose
The selfsame power that brought me there brought you. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beware of jokes from which we go away hollow and ashamed. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thanks to the morning light, Thanks to the foaming sea, To the uplands of New Hampshire, To the green-haired forest free. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We judge others by their actions but we judge ourselves by our intensions. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Night-dreams trace on Memory's wall Shadows of the thoughts of day, And thy fortunes, as they fall, The bias of the will betray. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
No rent-roll nor army-list can dignify skulking and dissimulation: and the first point of courtesy must always be truth, as really all the forms of good-breeding point that way. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some of your griefs you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you've endured
From evils that never arrived. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We know that madness belongs to love,
what power to paint a vile object in hues of heaven. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
You can take better care of your secret than another can. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star: she cannot be heaven, if she stoops to such a one as he. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew: The conscious stone to beauty grew. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
What care though rival cities soar
Along the stormy coast,
Penn's town, New York, Baltimore,
If Boston knew the most! -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I do not speak with any fondness but the language of coolest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town whichwas appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Best masters for the young writer and speaker are the fault- finding brothers and sisters at home who will not spare him, but willpick and cavil, and tell the odious truth. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fear is cruel and mean. The political reigns of terror have been reigns of madness and malignity,
a total perversion of opinion;society is upside down, and its best men are thought too bad to live. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man is a channel through which heaven floweth. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Religion is as effectively destroyed by bigotry as by indifference. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The light by which we see in this world comes out from the soul of the observer. Wherever any noble sentiment dwelt, it made the faces and houses around to shine. Nay, the powers of this busy brain are miraculous and illimitable. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The years teach much which the days never know. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. Warren Buffet -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Money often costs too much, and power and pleasure are not cheap. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Happy is the house that shelters a friend. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is a boundless privilege, and when you pay for your ticket, and get into the car, you have no guess what good company you shall find there. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do you think the porter and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no wonders for you? The walls of their minds are scrawled all over with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the vaunted works of Art, The master-stroke is Nature's part. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;-and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not be absent from the chamber which thou sittest. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art is the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why should we not have a first-hand and immediate experience of God? -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advancesto his own music, alike in frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral sentiment. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for the deliverance from fear. It is the storm within that endangers him, not the storm without. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
You may regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer, but if you cannot, mind your own business. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct. On this occasion, any complaisance would be criminal which told you, whose hope and commission it is to preach the faith of Christ, that the faith of Christ is preached. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Spring still makes spring in the mind
When sixty years are told:
Love wakes anew this throbbing heart,
And we are never old
Over the winter glaciers
I see the summer glow
And through the wind-piled snowdrift
The warm rosebuds below. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Most people, who have quit smoking, have had at least one unsuccessful try in the past. It is not important how many times you try to quit. The only important thing is, that eventually you stay quit -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain. The mind does not create what it perceives, anymore than the eye creates the rose. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genius is saying what is in your heart, because it's in everyone's heart. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are what we think about all day long. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a world of infinite choice people are struggling to figure out what to do. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work but the solidest things we know. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A poem, a sentence, causes us to see ourselves. I be, and I see my being, at the same time. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
But when you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I like the church, I like a cowl,
I love a prophet of the soul;
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles;
Yet not for all his faith can see,
Would I that cowled churchman be. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn ahundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great is the art,
Great be the manners, of the bard.
He shall not his brain encumber
With the coil of rhythm and number;
But, leaving rule and pale forethought,
He shall aye climb
For his rhyme.
"Pass in, pass in," the angels say -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We say love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage around his eyes. Blind - yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love for finding what he seeks, and only that. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some of your hurts you have cured, and the sharpest you've even survived. But what torments of grief you've endured from evils which never arrived - Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; ... he learns his ignorance, is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In old persons, when thus fully expressed, we often observe a fair, plump, perennial waxen complexion, which indicates that all the ferment of earlier days has subsided into serenity of thought and behavior. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some eyes threaten like a loaded and levelled pistol, and others are as insulting as hissing or kicking; some have no more expression than blueberries, while others are as deep as a well which you can fall into. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope of the heart. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us make education brave and preventive. Politics is an afterwork, a poor patching. We are always a little late ... We shall one day learn to supercede politics by education ... We must begin higher up, namely in Education. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is our dictionary -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Power dwells with cheerfulness. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do your work and I shall know you. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorageis quicksand. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Venus, when her son was lost,
Cried him up and down the coast,
In hamlets, palaces, and parks,
And told the truant by his marks,-
Golden curls, and quiver, and bow. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,
no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is with a good book as it is with good company. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of immortality, the soul, when well employed, is incurious. It is so well, that it is sure that it will be well. It asks no questions of the Supreme Power. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists - talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The household is a school of power. There, within the door, learn the tragi-comedy of human life. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whilst the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property are very unequal. Oneman owns his clothes, and another owns a country. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
One can never truly savor success until first tasting adversity. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are very near to greatness: one step and we are safe; can we not take the leap? -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Silent rushes the swift Lord
Through ruined systems still restored,
Broadsowing, bleak and void to bless,
Plants with worlds the wilderness;
Waters with tears of ancient sorrow
Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow.
House and tenant go to ground,
Lost in God, in Godhead found. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Brings domesticity and common sense, and that propriety which every man loves, directly into this hurly-burly, and makes every bully ashamed. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the path of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man must know how to estimate a sour face. The sour face of the multitude, like thier sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and the newspaper directs. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Read proudly
put the duty of being read invariably on the author. If he is not read, whose fault is it? I am quite ready to be charmed, but I shall not make-believe I am charmed. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language ... In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do ... Build, therefore, your own world. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ocean is a large drop; a drop is a small ocean. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not fear to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday experiment, but above all, good poetry in all kinds,
epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them; they will never forget it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after long time. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ability without honor has no value. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tomorrow, a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
By the irresistible maturing of the general mind, the Christian traditions have lost their hold. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the Fiji islands, it appears, cannibalism is now familiar. They eat thier own wives and children. We only devour widows' houses, and great merchants outwit and absorb the substance of small ones, and every man feeds on his neighbor's labor if he can. It is a milder form of cannibalism. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply,- "'Tis man's perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation, until all is said that words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best of life is conversation, and the greatest success is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
English history is aristocracy with the doors open. Who has courage and faculty, let him come in. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
For everything you gain, you lose something. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Economy does not consist in saving the coal, but in using the time while it burns. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Eyes...They speak all languages. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
But every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us is convertible by intellect into wholesome force. Fate is unpenetrated causes. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Liberty is a slow fruit. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Headwinds are sore vexations and the more passengers the sorer. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I'm happier. I guess I made up my mind to be that way. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is saturated with Deity. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The old men are as red as roses, and still handsome. A clear skin, a peach-bloom complexion, and good teeth are found all over the island. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Knowledge, Virtue, Power are the victories of man over his necessities, his march to the dominion of the world. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds;the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints, which speak to the intelligent. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
To this military attitude of the soul we give the name of Heroism ... It is a self-trust which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will ... -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchwork; now a little joy, then a sorrow, now a sin, then a generous or brave action. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Never miss an opportunity of noticing anything of beauty ... -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
True love transcends the unworthy object, and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A world in the hand is worth two in the bush. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Power is what they want, not candy-power to execute their design, power to give legs and feet, form and actuality to their thought; which, to a clear-sighted man, appears the end for which the universe exists, and all its resources might be well applied. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The good judge is not he who does hair-splitting justice to every allegation, but who, aiming at substantial justice, rules something intelligible of the guidance of suitors. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The test of civilization is the power of drawing the most benefit out of cities. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthily into nature. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you would lift me up, you've got to be on higher ground. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We cannot forgive another for not being ourselves. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. (Despite) all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether ... The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and a negative pole. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man. His character determines the character of the organization. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Necessity does everything well. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Women, as most susceptible, are the best index of the coming hour. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
All science is transcendental or else passes away. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The great make its feel, first of all, the indifference of circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions, and subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury; but the higher perceptions find their objects everywhere; only the low habits need palaces and banquets. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
How can he [today's writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Say, what other metre is it
Than the meeting of the eyes?
Nature poureth into nature
Through the channels of that feature
Riding on the ray of sight,
Fleeter far than whirlwinds go,
Or for service, or delight,
Hearts to hearts their meaning show. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
More than the diamond Koh-i-noor, which glitters among their crown jewels, they prize the dull pebble which is wiser than a man, whose poles turn themselves to the poles of the world, and whose axis is parallel to the axis of the world. Now, their toys are steam and galvanism. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis: therein is human power, in transference, not in creation; & therein is human destiny, not in longevity but in removal. We dive & reappear in new places. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Power resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Power ceases in the instant of respose, it resides in the moment of transition meaning -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The maxim of courts is that manner is power. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wise men read very sharply all of your private history in your look and gait and behavior. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
War, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing can be more delicate without being fantastical, nothing more firm and based in nature and sentiment, than the courtship and mutual carriage of the sexes. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The multitude of the sick shall not make us deny the existence of health. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don't ever give up on something or someone that you can't go a full day without thinking about. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sun shines today also. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you have a nation of men who have risen to that height of moral cultivation that they will not declare war or carry arms, for they have not so much madness left in their brains, you have a nation of lovers, of benefactors, of true, great, and able men. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The virtue you would like to have, assume it is already yours, appropriate it, enter into the part and live the character just as the great actor is absorbed in ... the part he plays. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Rude poets of the tavern hearth,
squandering your unquoted mirth,
which keeps the ground, and never soars,
while jake retorts, and reuben roars;
tough and screaming, as birch-bark,
goes like bullet to its mark;
while the solid curse and jeer
never balk the waiting ear. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young anddodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
For splendor, there must somewhere be rigid economy. That the head of the house may go brave, the members must be plainly clad, and the town must save that the State may spend. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
An actually existing fly is more important than a possibly existing angel. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The powers of the Soul are commensurate with its needs. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whoever is open, loyal, true; of humane and affable demeanour; honourable himself, and in his judgement of others; faithful to his word as to law, and faithful alike to God and man ... such a man is a true gentleman. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
This body, full of faults, Has yet one great quality: Whatever it encounters in this temporal life depends upon one's actions. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ancestor of every action is thought; when we understand that we begin to comprehend that our world is governed by thought and that everything without had its counterpart originally within the mind. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is plentiful with honey, but only the humble bee can collect it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The squirrel hoards nuts and the bee gathers honey, without knowing what they do, and they are thus provided for without selfishness or disgrace. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We flee away from cities, but we bring The best of cities, these learned classifiers, Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use the tools, they use you. All tools are in one sense edge-tools, and dangerous. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A seashell should be the crest of England, not only because it represents a power built on the waves, but also the hard finish ofthe men. The Englishman is finished like a cowry or a murex. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The practical common-sense of modern society, the utilitarian direction which labor, laws, opinion, religion, take, is the natural genius of the British mind. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A good form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science on the subject; and a beautiful face sets twenty hearts in palpitation, prior to all consideration of the mechanical proportions of the features and head. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is dainty to be sick if you have leisure and convenience for it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is not slow to equip us in the prison uniform of the party to which we adhere. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Invention breeds invention. No sooner is the electric telegraph devised than gutta-percha, the very material it requires, is found. The aeronaut is provided with gun-cotton, the very fuel he wants for his balloon. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown, Of thee, from the hill-top looking down; And the heifer, that lows in the upland farm, Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm; The sexton tolling the bell at noon, Dreams not that great Napoleon Sto -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every natural action is graceful. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think the vice of our housekeeping is that it does not hold man sacred. The vice of government, the vice of education, the viceof religion, is one with that of the private life. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every society, and men unconsciously seek for it in each other. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
As soon as a child has left the room his strewn toys become affecting. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is upheld by antagonism. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The years teach us much, which the days never knew. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul? -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We live in succession, in division, in parts and particles. Meantime, within man, is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are ... punished by fear. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Think me not unkind and rude
That I walk alone in grove and glen;
I go to the god of the wood
To fetch his word to men. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life only avails, not the having lived. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
When we can't piece together the puzzle of our own lives, remember the best view of a puzzle is from above. Let Him help put you together. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
By virtue of the Deity thought renews itself inexhaustibly every day and the thing whereon it shines, though it were dust and sand, is a new subject with countless relations. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of souls in the direction of Right and Necessity. It is the air which all intellects inhale and exhale, and it is the wind which blows the worlds into order and orbit. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Each religious sect has its own physiognomy. The Methodists have acquired a face; the Quakers, a face; the nuns, a face. An Englishman will pick out a dissenter by his manners. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We resent all criticism which denies us anything that lies in our line of advance. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see - not to eat, not for love, but only gliding. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mankind divides itself into two classes,
benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast; the first a handful. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I remember the thought which occurred to me when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, Have you been victimized in being brought hither?
or, prior to that, answer me this, Are you victimizable? -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our prayers are prophets. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
All things with which we deal preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,
it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a different shade. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every mind is different; and the more it is unfolded, the more pronounced is that difference. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Successful is the person who has lived well, laughed often and loved much, who has gained the respect of children, who leaves the world better than they found it, who has never lacked appreciation for the earth's beauty, who never fails to look for the best in others or give the best of themselves. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The true poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. In the man, could we lay him open, we should see the reason for the last flourish and tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the sea-shell preexist in the secreting organs of the fish. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men that is genius. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
How much finer things are in composition than alone. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Health is the first muse, comprising the magical benefits of air, landscape, and bodily exercise on the mind. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men lose their tempers in defending their taste. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The simplest words,
we do not know what they mean except when we love and aspire. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to love the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love Him was happiness;
to love Him in others' virtues. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Excite the soul, and the weather and the town and your condition in the world all disappear; the world itself loses its solidity, nothing remains but the soul and the Divine Presence in which it lives. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The advantage in education is always with those children who slip up into life without being objects of notice. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The house is a castle which the King cannot enter. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The art of conversation, or the qualification for a good companion, is a certain self-control, which now holds the subject, now lets it go, with a respect for the emergencies of the moment. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The religion which is to guide and fulfill the present and coming ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The scientific mind must have a faith which is science. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
You think me the child of circumstance; I make my circumstance. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love is the essence of God ... -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us arerushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no architect
Can build as the Muse can;
She is skilful to select
Materials for her plan. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Enlarge not thy destiny, said the oracle: endeavor not to do more than is given thee in charge. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who gave thee, O Beauty,
The keys of this breast,
Too credulous lover
Of blest and unblest?
Say, when in lapsed ages
Thee knew I of old?
Or what was the service
For which I was sold? -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is there of the divine in a load of brick? What ... in a barber shop? ... Much. All. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Pride ruined the angels. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-love is, in almost all men, such an over-weight that they are incredulous of a man's habitual preference of the general good to his own; but when they see it proved by sacrifices of ease, wealth, rank, and of life itself, there is no limit to their admiration. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A fly is as untamable as a hyena. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Besides the general infusion of wit to heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual power is ever welcome in fine society, as the costliest addition to its rule and its credit. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveler, who says anywhere but here. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In old Egypt, it was established law, that the vote of a prophet be reckoned equal to a hundred hands. I think it was much under-estimated. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let a stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Profound sincerity is the only basis of talent as of character. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape,I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, "Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more." Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each other's, because we are more our own? -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A mind might ponder its thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society. I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
When summer opens, I see how fast it matures, and fear it will be short; but after the heats of July and August, I am reconciled, like one who has had his swing, to the cool of autumn. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is the dwarf of himself. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
As long as our people quote English standards they dwarf their own proportions. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He stands close to Nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes to be. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its thought in a thing. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We love flattery, even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Today is a king in disguise. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Neither you nor the world knows what you can do until you have tried. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon As the best gem upon her zone. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do what you know and perception is converted into character. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We legislate against forestalling and monopoly; we would have a common granary for the poor; but the selfishness which hoards thecorn for high prices, is the preventative of famine; and the law of self-preservation is surer policy than any legislation can be. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let the amelioration in our laws of property proceed from the concession of the rich, not from the grasping of the poor. Let us understand that the equitable rule is, that no one should take more than his share, let him be ever so rich. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We gain the strength of the temptation we resist. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
[on Thoreau:] For not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to truth itself. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a capacity of virtue in us, and there is a capacity of vice to make your blood creep. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment. There -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Tho' her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive,
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of all debts, men are least willing to pay their taxes; what a satire this is on government. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
To give money to a sufferer is only a come-off. It is only a postponement of the real payment, a bribe paid for silence, a creditsystem in which a paper promise to pay answers for the time instead of liquidation. We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine alike of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all the members -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the seeming gang of gypsies and peddlars. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
How much more the seeker of abstract truth, who needs periods of isolation, and rapt concentration, and almost a going out of thebody to think! -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Religionists are clinging to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law ... while the laws of the Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, the astronomy etc. are all unobserved, and sneered at when spoken of. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses, and violets, and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates as fast as the sun breeds clouds. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The forest waves, the morning breaks,
The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,
Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be
And life pulsates in rock or tree. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would say only what was uppermost in their own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest good men. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is a festival only to the wise. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Standing on the bare ground,
my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,
all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Conversation is our account of ourselves ... Conversation is the vent of character as well as thoughts ... It is the laboratory of the student. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
To believe in luck, if it were not a solecism so to use the word believe, is skepticism. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The human body is a magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint is taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man has a right perception of any truth, who has not been reacted on by it, so as to be ready to be its martyr. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The amount of a man's wealth consists in the number of things he can do without. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friends should be like books, easy to find when you need them, but seldom used. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
All high beauty has a moral element in it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
And what is Genius but finer love, a love impersonal, a love of the flower and perfection of things, and a desire to draw a new picture or copy of the same? It looks to the cause and life: it proceeds from within outward, whilst Talent goes from without inward. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises. 'Tis the vulgar great who come dizened with gold and jewels. Real kings hide away their crowns in their wardrobes, and affect a plain and poor exterior. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Bonaparte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer, the good poet, the good player. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Necessity does everything well. In our condition of universal dependence, it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, and to give all that is asked, though at great inconvenience. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
That which we object to in others is often experiment for ourselves. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ancestor of every action is a thought -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I found when I had finished my new lecture that it was a very good house, only the architect had unfortunately omitted the stairs. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My garden is a forest ledge
Which older forest s bound;
The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge,
Then plunge to depths profound! -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The education of the will is the object of our existence. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A person seldom falls sick, but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
All great successes are the triumph of persistence. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he! -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Perhaps love is only the highest symbol of friendship, as all other things seem symbols of love. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
O friend, never strike sail to a fear! -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If it costs ten years, and ten to recover the general prosperity, the destruction of the South is worth so much. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why need I volumes, if one word suffice? -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be brave enough to do the loving thing. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode.It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful. Man is never weary of working it up. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Intellect is void of affection and sees an object as it stands in the light of science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the individual, floats over its own personality, and regards it as a fact, and not as I and mine. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The lover is made happier by his love than the object of his affection. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A woman's strength is the unresistible might of weakness. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man ever came to an experience which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward! -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have been told by persons of experience in matters of taste, that the fashions follow a law of gradation, and are never arbitrary. The new mode is always only a step onward in the same direction as the last mode; and a cultivated eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beware of what you want-for you will get it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wait, and thy soul shall speak. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A few years ago, the liberal churches complained that the Calvinistic church denied to them the name of Christian. I think the complaint was confession; a religious church would not complain. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The public values the invention more than the inventor does. The inventor knows there is much more and better where this came from. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is young: the former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the right hands, literature is not resorted to as a consolation, and by the broken and decayed, but as a decalogue. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is nothing capricious in nature and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feel it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Successful people live well, laugh often, and love much. They've filled a niche and accomplished tasks so as to leave the world better than they found it, while looking for the best in others, and giving the best they have. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The State is a poor, good beast who means the best: it means friendly. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Courage is temperamental, scientific, ideal. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man is an impossibility until he is born. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The gates of thought, - how slow and late they discover themselves! Yet when they appear, we see that they were always there, always open. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
For beauty is God's handwriting ... A nd, thank God for it as a cup of His blessing. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The crime which bankrupts men and nations is that of turning aside from one's main purpose to serve a job here and there. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Find the journey's end in every step. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons, that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subserves;such as we see in the sexual attraction. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman - repose in energy. The Greek battle pieces are calm; the heroes, in whatever violent actions engaged, retain a serene aspect. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is always a best way of doing everything. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We take care of our health; we lay up money; we make our roof tight, and our clothing sufficient; but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting in the best property of all, -friends? -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
One more fagot of these adamantine bandages is the new science of Statistics. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Solitude is naught and society is naught. Alternate them and the good of each is seen. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The university must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Goodreads could be a source for knowledge but instead does all readers a supreme disservice by allowing the spread of false quotes on the Internet. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let not the tie be mercenary, though the service is measured in money. Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
One idea lights a thousand candles. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Character is that which can do without success. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord's power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The solitary knows the essence of the thought, the scholar in society only its fair face. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Free should be the scholar - free and brave. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The society of the energetic class, in their friendly and festive meetings, is full of courage, and of attempts, which intimidatethe pale scholar. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson