Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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England's genius filled all measure
Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,
Gave to the mind its emperor,
And life was larger than before:
Nor sequent centuries could hit
Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.
The men who lived with him became
Poets, for the air was fame.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes much impression on him, and another none.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or noble moments that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think that our popular theology has gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has displaced. But men are better than this theology. Their daily life gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the doctrine behind him in his own experience; and all men feel sometimes the falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. For men are wiser than they know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits without after-thought, if said in conversation, would probably be questioned in silence. If a man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the divine laws, he is answered by a silence which conveys well enough to an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to make his own statement.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are very near to greatness: one step and we are safe; can we not take the leap?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of form.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of his tuition comes, on his way to school, from the shopwindows.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Pines a thousand years old. Every year they must go farther for them: they recede, like beavers and Indians, before the white man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great conversation... requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct. On this occasion, any complaisance would be criminal which told you, whose hope and commission it is to preach the faith of Christ, that the faith of Christ is preached.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But it is impossible that the creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed,through which the creator passes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility? The ocean is everywhere the same, but it has no character until seen with the shore or the ship.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In our definitions, we grope after the spiritual by describing it as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is real; that law which executes itself, which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not existing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The four-quarters of the globe are no longer Europe, Asia, Africa and America, but Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Nitrogen.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears.

Ralph Waldo Emerson