Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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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 condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The question is whether [suicide] is the way out, or the way in.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly adds to our power and enlarges our field of action.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.

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

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
A part of fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in his soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Happy is the house that shelters a friend.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak.

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

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

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