Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine. The simplicity of nature is not that which may be easily read but is inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be made.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A farm is a good thing, when it begins and ends with itself, and does not need a salary, or a shop, to eke it out.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing can be more delicate without being fantastical, nothing more firm and based in nature and sentiment, than the courtship and mutual carriage of the sexes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made--no matter how indirectly--to numbers, proclamation is then and there made, that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet, enveloping presence, who shall dare to come in?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Conservatism is affluent and openhanded, but there is a cunning juggle in riches. I observe that they take somewhat for everythingthey give. I look bigger, but am less; I have more clothes, but am nit so warm; more armor, but less courage; more books, but less wit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, and yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They have all been invented over and over fifty times. Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. He helps himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own structure, just so far as then need is.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The field cannot be well seen from within the field. The astronomer must have his diameter of the earth's orbit as a base to fix the parallax of any other star

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us learn the meaning of economy. Economy is a high human office,--a sacrament when its aim is grand, when it is the prudence of simple tastes, when it is practised for freedom or for love or devotion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
How calmly and genially the mind apprehends one after another the laws of Physics!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A few years ago, the liberal churches complained that the Calvinistic church denied to them the name of Christian. I think the complaint was confession; a religious church would not complain.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot, with your best deliberation and heed, come so close to any question as your spontaneous glance shall bring you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen but society has chosen for us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar's dinner, from a hundred charities?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every body we know surrounds himself with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage, and all manner of toys, as screens to interpose between himself and his guest. Does it not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a full rencontre front to front with his fellow?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Solitary converse with nature; for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
One more fagot of these adamantine bandages is the new science of Statistics.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The mystic must be steadily told,-All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,-universal signs, instead of these village symbols,-and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The eloquence of one stimulates all the rest, some up to the speaking-point, and all others to a degree that makes them good receivers and conductors, and they avenge themselves for their enforced silence by increased loquacity on their return.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party; the rich and the strong can better take care of themselves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no man of Nature's worth
In the circle of the earth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In dreams we are true poets; we create the persons of the drama; we give them appropriate figures faces, costumes; they are perfect in their organs, attitudes, manners; moreover they speak after their own characters, not ours; and we listen with surprise to what they say.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Human society is made up of partialities. Each citizen has an interest and a view of his own, which, if followed out to the extreme, would leave no room for any other citizen.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality.

Ralph Waldo Emerson