Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
God said, I am tired of kings,
I suffer them no more;
Up to my ear the morning brings
The outrage of the poor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere, where it plays a part as indestructible as any other.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, — now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The man in the street does not know a star in the sky.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is time to be old,
To take in sail: -
The god of bounds,
Who sets to seas a shore,
Came to me in his fatal rounds,
And said: 'No more!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
For the prevision is allied
Unto the thing so signified;
Or say, the foresight that awaits
Is the same Genius that creates.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is a boundless privilege, and when you pay for your ticket, and get into the car, you have no guess what good company you shall find there.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, or ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world. The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone. Spirit, that made those heroes dare,
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The glance is natural magic. The mysterious communication established across a house between two entire strangers, moves all the springs of wonder.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.

Ralph Waldo Emerson