Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Pass in, pass in, the angels say,
In to the upper doors;
Nor count compartments of the floors,
But mount to Paradise
By the stairway of surprise.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every friend whom not thy fantastic will but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly in endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From evils which never arrived!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
He who loves the bristle of bayonets only sees in the glitter what beforehand he feels in his heart. It is avarice and hatred; it is that quivering lip, that cold, hating eye, which built magazines and powder-houses.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The great man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As we are, so we do; and as we do, so is it done to us; we are the builders of our fortunes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let a man then know his worth and keep things under his feet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The unbelief of the age is attested by the loud condemnation of trifles.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The judge weighs the arguments and puts a brave face on the matter, and since there must be a decision, decides as he can, and hopes he has done justice and given satisfaction to the community

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We love flattery, even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought from age to age.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When you have worn out your shoes, the strength of the show fiber has passed into your body.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As I walked in the woods I felt what I often feel that nothing can befall me in life, no calamity, no disgrace (leaving me my eyes) to which Nature will not offer a sweet consolation. Standing on the bare ground with my head bathed by the blithe air, & uplifted into the infinite space, I become happy in my universal relations. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign & accidental. I am the heir of uncontained beauty and power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man is an infinitely repelling orb, and holds his individual being on that condition.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession', for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.

Ralph Waldo Emerson