Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to be the shadow of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is his chest; the suspicion she has awakened, is her ornament

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The reason why any one refuses his assent to your opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, is in you: he refuses to accept you as a bringer of truth, because, though you think you have it, he feels that you have it not. You have not given him the authentic sign.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not you see that every misfortune is misconduct; that every honour is desert; that every effort is an insolence of your own?...You carry your fortune in your own hand.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a man fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth and apply himself to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself but falsehood.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses sing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The common experience is, that the man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. Then he is part of the machine he moves; the man is lost.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men are so charmed with valor that they have pleased themselves with being called lions, leopards, eagles and dragons, from the animals contemporary with us in the geologic formations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why has my motley diary no jokes? Because it is a soliloquy and every man is grave alone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of things.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man ever came to an experience which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We do not want actions, but men; not a chemical drop of water, but rain; the spirit that sheds and showers actions, countless, endless actions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The astronomer, the geometer, rely on their irrefragable analysis, and disdain the results of observation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Yet some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, and wherever the vein of thought reaches down into the profound, there is no danger from vanity. Solemn friends will warn them of the danger of the head's being turned by the flourish of trumpets, but they can afford to smile.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The good judge is not he who does hair-splitting justice to every allegation, but who, aiming at substantial justice, rules something intelligible of the guidance of suitors.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The men who come on the stage at one period are all found to be related to each other. Certain ideas are in the air.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. He is strong, not to do, but to live; not in his arms, but in his heart; not as an agent, but as a fact.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take a single step that would bring them there.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence; without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal Cause.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The telescope may be likened to a wondrous cyclopean eye, endued with superhuman power, by which the astronomer extends the reach of his vision to the further heavens, and surveys galaxies and universes compared with which the solar system is but an atom floating in the air.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile either on persons, or opinions, or possessions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson