Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a man sits down to think, he is immediately asked if he has a headache.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs;
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The truth, the hope of any time, must always be sought in minorities.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Can we never extract the tapeworm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into today, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But these young scholars who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes,
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound to the healthy ear.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home:
Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The gods sell anything and to everybody at a fair price.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Law rules throughout existence, a law which is not intelligent, but Intelligence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The universe is all chemistry, with a certain hint of a magnificent Whence or Whereto.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are…books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson