Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society. I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
England's genius filled all measure
Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,
Gave to the mind its emperor,
And life was larger than before:
Nor sequent centuries could hit
Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.
The men who lived with him became
Poets, for the air was fame.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Pride ruined the angels,
Their shame them restores;
And the joy that is sweetest
Lurks in stings of remorse.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn ahundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The philanthropists inquire whether Transcendentalism does not mean sloth: they had as lief hear that their friend is dead, as that he is a Transcendentalist; for then is he paralyzed, and can never do anything for humanity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The bulk of mankind believe in two gods. They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion; but in mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come under another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the fruit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In his [the writer's] eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The men who come on the stage at one period are all found to be related to each other. Certain ideas are in the air.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made--no matter how indirectly--to numbers, proclamation is then and there made, that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet, enveloping presence, who shall dare to come in?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson