Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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Genius is the power to labor better and more availably. Deserve thy genius: exalt it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No anchor, no cable, no fences, avail to keep a fact a fact.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Talent for talent's sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word...

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I saw men go up and down,
In the country and the town,
With this tablet on their neck,—
'Judgement and a judge we seek.'
Not to monarchs they repair,
Nor to learned jurist's chair;
But they hurry to their peers,
To their kinsfolk and their dears;
Louder than with speech they pray,—
'What am I? companion, say.'

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the dissenter, the theorist, the aspirant, who is quitting this ancient domain to embark on seas of adventure, who engages our interest. Omitting then for the present all notice of the stationary class, we shall find that the movement party divides itself into two classes, the actors, and the students.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
'Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a capacity of virtue in us, and there is a capacity of vice to make your blood creep.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
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 god- like ease and power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I quote another man's saying; unluckily, that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe: that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wherever there is failure, there is some giddiness, some superstition about luck, some step omitted, which, Nature never pardons.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The moral sense reappears today with the same morning newness that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say there is no religion now. 'Tis like saying in rainy weather, There is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of its superlative effects.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of drunkenness is, that it insulates us in thought, whilst it unites us in feeling.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Old age brings along with its uglinesses the comfort that you will soon be out of it, - which ought to be a substantial relief to such discontented pendulums as we are.

Ralph Waldo Emerson