Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is what it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field the next man will appear.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
How painful to give a gift to any person of sensibility, or of equality! It is next worst to receiving one

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The moral sense reappears today with the same morning newness that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say there is no religion now. 'Tis like saying in rainy weather, There is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of its superlative effects.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep and pass and turn again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Venus, when her son was lost,
Cried him up and down the coast,
In hamlets, palaces, and parks,
And told the truant by his marks,-
Golden curls, and quiver, and bow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our first mistake is the belief that the circumstance gives the joy which we give to the circumstance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous organ. It will flow out of your actions, your manners, and your face. It will bring you friendships. It will impledge you to truth by the love and expectation of generous minds. By virtue of the laws of that Nature, which is one and perfect, it shall yield every sincere good that is in the soul, to the scholar beloved of earth and heaven.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young
And always keep us so.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is there in 'Paradise Lost' to elevate and astonish like Herschel or Somerville?

Ralph Waldo Emerson