Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something. If riches increase, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly are.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused; when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The South-wind brings Life, sunshine and desire, And on every mount and meadow Breathes aromatic fire; But over the dead he has no power, The lost, the lost, he cannot restore; And, looking over the hills, I mourn The darling who shall not return.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work. The lesson one learns from yachting or planting is the manners of Nature; patience with the delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather, excess or lack of water.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I spoke of friendship, but my friends and I are fishes in our habit. As for taking Thoreau's arm, I should as soon take the arm of an elm tree.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The attraction and superiority of California are in its days. It has better days, and more of them, than any other country.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A human being should beware how he laughs, for then he shows all his faults.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly make their executive officers out of saints.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Things have their laws as well as men; things refuse to be trifled with.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
To make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and…it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path…. He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
This world we live in is but thickened light.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The two parties which divide the State, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made … Now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities … Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the pause on the last movement.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Those who listened to Lord Chatham felt that there was something finer in the man, than anything which he said.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
He who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the plants, the waters, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments - is the rich and royal man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.

Ralph Waldo Emerson