Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last,
a long way leading nowhere.

We know who is benevolent, by quite other means than the amount of subscriptions to soup-societies. It is only low merits that canbe enumerated.

Our health is our sound relation to external objects; our sympathy with external being.

Any work looks wonderful to me except the one which I can do.

Every calamity is a spur and a valuable hint.

Every[one] I meet is in some way my superior.

I will no longer confer, differ, refer, defer, prefer, or suffer. I renounce the whole tribe of fero. I embrace absolute life.

Intemperance is the only vulgarity.

It is better to hear than to speak.

I will receive from them not what they have but what they are.

A man is a little thing while he works by and for himself; but when he gives voice to the rules of love and justice, he is godlike ...

Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.

For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things?

In God, every end is converted into a new means. Thus the use of commodity, regarded by itself, is mean and squalid.

Earth's a howling wilderness,
Truculent with fraud and force.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Art is evidence of our most creative moment.

The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.

Reality is a sliding door.

It is time to be old
To take in sail.

Excellence is the new forever.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.

It is in rugged crises, in unbearable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of the question, that the angel is shown.

Rectitude is a perpetual victory, celebrated not by cries of joy but by serenity, which is joy fixed or habitual.

We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.

You become what you think about all day long.

I like sayers of no better than I like sayers of yes.

Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us.

Spartans, stoics, heroes, saints and gods use short and positive speech.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.

The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.

All men are poets at heart.

Knowledge is the antidote to fear,-
Knowledge, Use and Reason, with its higher aids.

Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, the eternal One.

A party is perpetually corrupted by personality.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal.

Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology.

Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them.

An artist spends himself like the crayon in his hand, till he is all gone.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

As a man thinketh, so is he, and as a man chooseth, so is he.

The best nations are those most widely related; and navigation, as effecting a world-wide mixture, is the most potent advancer ofnations.

Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul

Power resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

Every man is a channel through which heaven floweth.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun.

Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth.

Every thought is public,
Every nook is wide;
Thy gossips spread each whisper,
And the gods from side to side.

Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent. All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone.

When I first open my eyes upon the morning meadows and look out upon the beautiful world, I thank God I am alive.

The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious.

Fear is a great instructor.

Do your work and I shall know you.

Thought makes everything fit for use.

The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

The first point of courtesy must always be truth.

Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen but society has chosen for us.

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.

The only money of God is God. He pays never with any thing less, or any thing else.

When a man becomes a conformist, he is sacrificing the richness of independent thinking.

The primary wisdom is intuition.

Culture opens the sense of beauty.

A man is a god in ruins.When men are innocent,life shall be longer and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams

In the woods, we return to reason and faith.

Luck is just another word for tenacity of purpose.

Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimneyside of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front.

No change in circumstances can repair a defect of character.

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practical man relies on the language of the first.

I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.

In England every man you meet is some man's son; in America, he may be some man's father.

Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.

Power is the first good.

To accomplish excellence or anything outstanding, you must listen to that whisper which is heard by you alone.

Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant

Conversation is our account of ourselves ... Conversation is the vent of character as well as thoughts ... It is the laboratory of the student.

Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves.

America is not civil, whilst Africa is barbarous.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior.

Never try to make anyone like you: you know, and God knows, that one of you is enough.

We are very near to greatness: one step and we are safe; can we not take the leap?

It is defeat which educates us.

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.

We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.

I grieve that grief can teach me nothing.

The borrower runs in his own debt.

Life is too short to waste ... 'Twill soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark!

The highest revelation is that God is in every man.