Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

“The only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.”

“Accuracy is essential to beauty.”

“There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same.”

“You cannot do a kindness too soon.”

“Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.”

“Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew, and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.”

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

“Men are so charmed with valor that they have pleased themselves with being called lions, leopards, eagles and dragons, from the animals contemporary with us in the geologic formations.”

“How casually and unobservedly we make all our most valued acquaintances.”

“Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.”

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

“Love is like wildflowers;It's often found in the most unlikely places.”

“The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.”

“When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the next man will appear.”

“All life is an experiment. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment. I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom. Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.”

“Valor consists in the power of self recovery.”

“The goof man, in dealing with his people, taxes them with luxury.”

“There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty.”

“Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.”

“Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.”

“My joy in friends, those sacred people, is my consolation.”

“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.”

“Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go.”

“Adult males are what their moms designed them.”

“The world of men show like a comedy without laughter: populations, interests, government, history; 't is all toy figures in a toyhouse.”