Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture and leave nothing but pure power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Water... transports vast boulders of rock in its iceberg a thousand miles. But its far greater power depends on its talent of becoming little, and entering the smallest holes and pores. By this agency, carrying in solution elements needful to every plant, the vegetable world exists.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Enlarge not thy destiny, said the oracle: endeavor not to do more than is given thee in charge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers' hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society is frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into ceremonies and escapes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows whither.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit, in every work of art; since the author of it was not misled by anything short- livedor local, but abode by real and abiding traits.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men together again after ten years, and if the presence of some penetrating and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confession of insanities would come up!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy,--more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There was never anything that did not proceed from a thought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
History is full, down to this day, of the imbecility of kings and governors. They are a class of persons much to be pitied, for they know not what they should do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains...

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What power does Nature not owe to her duration, of amassing infinitesimals into cosmical forces!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame...

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit, and not give the bread of life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The squirrel hoards nuts and the bee gathers honey, without knowing what they do, and they are thus provided for without selfishness or disgrace.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Politics is a deleterious profession, like some poisonous handicrafts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The power of a man increases steadily by continuance in one direction. He becomes acquainted with the resistances and with his own tools; increases his skill and strength and learns the favorable moments and favorable accidents.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the eclat in the universe. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the character of his fellows.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is nothing we value and hunt and cultivate and strive to draw to us, but in some hour we turn and rend it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world leaves no track in space, and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast idea.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A great man will find a great subject, or which is the same thing, make any subject great.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Manners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of impediments, and bring the man pure to energize. They aid our dealing and conversation, as a railway aids travelling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of the road, and leaving nothing to be conquered but pure space.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I DO not count the hours I spend In wandering by the sea; The forest is my loyal friend, Like God it useth me.

Ralph Waldo Emerson