Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Speak the affirmative; emphasize your choice by utter ignoring of all that you reject.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ever the words of the gods resound; But the porches of man's ear seldom in this low life's round are unsealed, that he may hear.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are…books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genius is the power to labor better and more availably. Deserve thy genius: exalt it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The poisons are our principal medicines, which kill the disease and save the life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
And with Caesar to take in his hand the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, and say, "All these will I relinquish if you will show me the fountain of the Nile."

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The music that can deepest reach,
And cure all ill, is cordial speech.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The heroic cannot be the common, nor can the common be the heroic.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust: to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
One must thank the genius of Brigham Young for the creation of Salt Lake City,—an inestimable hospitality to the Overland Emigrants, and an efficient example to all men in the vast desert, teaching how to subdue and turn it to a habitable garden.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the way of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little, you gain the great.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Line in nature is not found;
Unit and universe are round;
In vain produced, all rays return;
Evil will bless, and ice will burn.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The universe is all chemistry, with a certain hint of a magnificent Whence or Whereto.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Law rules throughout existence, a law which is not intelligent, but Intelligence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The gods sell anything and to everybody at a fair price.

Ralph Waldo Emerson