Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.

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
The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
You can never do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Put God in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment is with-held, the better for you; for compound interest on compound interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a capacity of virtue in us, and there is a capacity of vice to make your blood creep.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see — not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
He who loves goodness harbors angels, reveres reverence, and lives with God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If we must accept fate we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
God is our name for the last generalization to which we can arrive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt;
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Knowledge is the antidote to fear,-
Knowledge, Use and Reason, with its higher aids.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
So is music an asylum. It takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence and whereto.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in the river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one; on that side all obstruction is taken away, and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying out of gardens.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:-never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them written in his hand.

Ralph Waldo Emerson