Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tomorrow will be like today. Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word Politic, which now for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The interminable forests should become graceful parks, for use and delight.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Are you not scared by seeing that the gypsies are more attractive to us than the apostles?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept or if you have slept or if you have head ache or sciatica or leprosy or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace and not pollute the morning.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man passes for that he is worth. What he is engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his fortunes, in letters of light. Concealment avails him nothing; boasting nothing. There is confession in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the grasp of hands.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I hung my verse in the wind
Time and tide their faults will find.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every natural power exhilarates; a true talent delights the possessor first.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as two sides of an algebraic equation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Delicious is a just and firm encounter of two in a thought, in a feeling.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We need books of this tart cathartic virtue, more than books of political science or of private economy.
On plutarch's Lives

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are two laws discrete
Not reconciled,
Law for man, and law for thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a man carefully examine his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead. Such a creature is probably immortal.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I go into the garden with a spade and dig a bed I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us replace sentimentalism by realism and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern.

Ralph Waldo Emerson