Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Science corrects the old creeds, sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile catechisms, and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses yet it does not surprise the moral sentiment that was older and awaited expectant these larger insights.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there; but no one else could ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book, and ransack every page.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs....

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows...

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of cheerfulness, or a good temper - the more it is spent, the more of it remains.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, "If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?"

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We forget ourselves and our destinies in health, and the chief use of temporary sickness is to remind us of these concerns.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When summer opens, I see how fast it matures, and fear it will be short; but after the heats of July and August, I am reconciled, like one who has had his swing, to the cool of autumn.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In like manner the effect of every action is measured by the depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds. The great man knew not that he was great. It took a century or two for that fact to appear. What he did, he did, he did because he must; it was the most natural thing in the world, and grew out of the circumstances of the moment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Perhaps love is only the highest symbol of friendship, as all other things seem symbols of love.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, — seven or eight ancestors at least, — and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am sure of this, that by going much alone a man will get more of a noble courage in thought and word than from all the wisdom that is in books.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Money, which represents the prose in life, and which is hardly mentioned in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill?
Pay every debt, as if God wrote the bill!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Coolness and absence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a good ear, in some men, that draws supplies to virtue out of very indifferent nutriment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson