Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

2,528 Sourced Quotes

In childhood we fancied ourselves walled in by the horizon, as by a glass bell, and doubted not by distant travel we should reach the baths of the descending sun and stars. On experiment the horizon flies before us and leaves us on an endless common, sheltered by mo glass bell.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the vast and the spiritual are omitted, so are the practical and the moral.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have been told by persons of experience in matters of taste, that the fashions follow a law of gradation, and are never arbitrary. The new mode is always only a step onward in the same direction as the last mode; and a cultivated eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is always a practical difficulty with clubs to regulate the laws of election so as to exclude peremptorily every social nuisance. Nobody wishes bad manners. We must have loyalty and character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, reallyshow very little relation to each other; never meet and measure each other: one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every word we speak is million-faced or convertible to an indefinite number of applications. If it were not so we could read no book. Your remark would only fit your case, not mine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
To science there is no poison; to botany no weed; to chemistry no dirt.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of Nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive atthe precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Buddhist, who thanks no man, who says "Do not flatter your benefactors," but who, in his conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
This knot of nature is so well tied that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In all conversation between two persons, tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hither rolls the storm of heat;
I feel its finer billows beat
Like a sea which me infolds;
Heat with viewless fingers moulds,
Swells, and mellows, and matures,
Paints, and flavors, and allures,
Bird and brier inly warms,
Still enriches and transforms,
Gives the reed and lily length,
Adds to oak and oxen strength,
Transforming what it doth infold,
Life out of death, new out of old.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be low, as that we should be low; for we musthave a society.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs, by imitation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the current of events, and strong with their strength.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be sure then to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn, without asking, in the street and the train.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitering and recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall combine for thesalvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve; and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Oxford is a little aristocracy in itself, numerous and dignified enough to rank with other estates in the realm; and where fame and secular promotion are to be had for study, and in a direction which has the unanimous respect of all cultivated nations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I always seem to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are days when the great are near us, when there is no frown on their brow, no condescension even; when they take us by the hand, and we share their thought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson