Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of his tuition comes, on his way to school, from the shopwindows.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of form.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think that our popular theology has gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has displaced. But men are better than this theology. Their daily life gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the doctrine behind him in his own experience; and all men feel sometimes the falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. For men are wiser than they know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits without after-thought, if said in conversation, would probably be questioned in silence. If a man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the divine laws, he is answered by a silence which conveys well enough to an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to make his own statement.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or noble moments that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes much impression on him, and another none.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
England's genius filled all measure
Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,
Gave to the mind its emperor,
And life was larger than before:
Nor sequent centuries could hit
Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.
The men who lived with him became
Poets, for the air was fame.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us replace sentimentalism by realism and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I go into the garden with a spade and dig a bed I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a man carefully examine his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead. Such a creature is probably immortal.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are two laws discrete
Not reconciled,
Law for man, and law for thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word Politic, which now for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The interminable forests should become graceful parks, for use and delight.

Ralph Waldo Emerson