Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In strict science, all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining forthe metaphysical foundation of this elysian temple? Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Within, I do not find wrinkles and used heart, but unspent youth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We acquire the strength we have overcome.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let the man stand on his feet. Let religion cease to be occasional; and the pulses of thought that go to the borders of the universe, let them proceed from the bosom of the Household.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world; I ask, When shall I die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeinga Universe which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I walk up the piazza of Santa Croce I feel as if it were not a Florentine nor an European church but a church built by and for the human race.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are disgusted by gossip; yet it is of importance to keep the angels in their proprieties.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Happy the man who never puts on a face, but receives every visitor with that countenance he has on.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope, knowing that the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is girt all round with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky.... These road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must extend the area of life and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a property in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you, or quietly drops you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of someone's mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No performance is worth loss of geniality. 'Tis a cruel price we pay for certain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The advantage in education is always with those children who slip up into life without being objects of notice.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Really, all things and persons are related to us, but according to our nature, they act on us not at once, but in succession, andwe are made aware of their presence one at a time. All persons, all things which we have known, are here present, and many more than we see; the world is full.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grandand immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When there is sympathy, there needs but one wise man in a company and all are wise,--so, a blockhead makes a blockhead of his companion. Wonderful power to benumb possesses this brother.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In Haydn's oratorios, the notes present to the imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also; as the green grass.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, -- whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Money is of no value; it cannot spend itself. All depends on the skill of the spender.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But in our experience, man is cheap and friendship wants its deep sense. We affect to dwell with our friends in their absence, but we do not; when deed, word, or letter comes not, they let us go.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you visit your friend, why need you apologize for not having visited him, and waste his time and deface your own act? Visit him now.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The university must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson