Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

“Life too near paralyses art.”

“The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded.”

“As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.”

“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poeticyouth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”

“In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.”

“Knowledge is the antidote to fear. [especially as fear often stands for false evidence appearing real!]”

“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore it if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”

“All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.”

“We must be our own before we can be another's.”

“Enthusiasm is the engine of success.”

“England produces under favorable conditions of ease and culture the finest women in the world. And, as the men are affectionate and true-hearted, the women inspire and refine them.”

“We go to Europe to be Americanized.”

“Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.”

“Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.”

“The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.”

“Not the sun or summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight.”

“All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are ... punished by fear.”

“Women, as most susceptible, are the best index of the coming hour.”

“The poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him.”

“Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.”

“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.”

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

“Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces, which expose the whole movement.”

“Whoever fights, whoever falls, Justice conquers evermore”

“Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books.”