Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.

A day is a miniature eternity.

Our best thoughts come from others.

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

New arts destroy the old.

In dreams we are true poets; we create the persons of the drama; we give them appropriate figures faces, costumes; they are perfect in their organs, attitudes, manners; moreover they speak after their own characters, not ours; and we listen with surprise to what they say.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.

A man must be in sympathy with society around him, or else, not wish to be in sympathy with it. If neither of these two, he must be wretched.

What matters most is not what is behind us or before us, but what is within us.

Be lord of a day, through wisdom and justice, and you can put up your history books.

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.

No society can ever be so large as one man.

Human beings cannot endure the geological chaos they encounter under the soil of their own gardens.

The shot heard round the world.

When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.

The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread.

If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries.

Find the journey's end in every step.

We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.

Ten percent of people can think, another ten percent of people think that they think, and eighty percent of people would rather die than be made to think.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen.

There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes.

In the actual world--the painful kingdom of time and place--dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy.

The great majority of men grow up and grow old in seeming and following.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is due to the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it

Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time.

That which we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

The world belongs to the energetic.

The universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest.

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.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science, and such is the mechanical determination of our age, and so recent are our best contrivances, that use has not dulled our joy and pride in them. These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a godlike ease and power.

It is a greater joy to see the author's author, than himself.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

The world is so beautiful that I can hardly believe it exists.

A man cannot utter two or three sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or in that of ideas and imagination, or in the realm of intuitions and duty.

In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is thereforeuseful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.

Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part.

There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.

I admire answers to which no answers can be made.

Courage of the soldier awakes the courage of woman.

All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of man's limbs and senses.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

Go where he will, the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

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.

Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

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

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

How we hate this solemn Ego that accompanies the learned, like a double, wherever he goes.

In the first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.