Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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Heaven is large, and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him; he has become tediously good insome particular but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first questions are always to be asked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitiveness of a child.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why should I hasten to solve every riddle which life offers me? I am well assured that the Questioner, who brings me so many problems, will bring me the answers also, in due time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is there of the divine in a load of brick? What... in a barber shop?... Much. All.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are thevictims of these details, and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
People who wash much have a high mind about it, and talk down to those who wash little.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions. Men are too coarsely made for the delicacy of beautiful carriage and customs. It is not quite sufficient to good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his confidence in the attributes of the intellect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The love of novels is the preference of sentiment to the senses.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It seems as if the day was not wholly profane in which we have given heed to some natural object.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The good husband finds method as efficient in the packing of fire-wood in a shed, or in the harvesting of fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns or the files of the Department of State.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical, compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect remains.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Solitude is naught and society is naught. Alternate them and the good of each is seen.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
'Tis a good rule in every journey to provide some piece of liberal study to rescue the hours which bad weather, bad company, and taverns steal from the best economist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
How much we forgive to those who yield us the rare spectacle of heroic manners! We will pardon them the want of books, or arts, and even of gentler virtues. How tenaciously we remember them!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thy dangerous glances
make women of men;
new-born, we are melting
into nature again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The asteroids are the chips of an old star, and a meteoric stone is a chip of an asteroid.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no skepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson