Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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The soul contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts; and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We may like well to know what is Plato's and what is Montesquieu's or Goethe's part, and what thought was always dear to the writer himself; but the worth of the sentences consists in their radiancy and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all our facts like a charm. We respect ourselves the more that we know them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dews.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Use makes a better soldier than the most urgent considerations of duty,--familiarity with danger enabling him to estimate the danger. He sees how much is the risk, and is not afflicted with imagination; knows practically Marshal Saxe's rule, that every soldier killed costs the enemy his weight in lead.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I now require this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A Frenchman may possibly be clean; an Englishman is conscientiously clean.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Look sharply after your thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen on your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear; and you shall never find that perception again; never, I say — but perhaps years, ages, and I know not what events and worlds may lie between you and its return!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wise and just man will always feel that he stands on his own feet; that he imparts strength to the state, not receives security from it; and if all went down, he and such as he would quite easily combine in a new and better constitution.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything has its price - and if that price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained... it is impossible to get anything without this price.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No anchor, no cable, no fences, avail to keep a fact a fact.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Universally, the better gold the worse man. The political economist defies us to show any gold mine country that is traversed by good roads, or a shore where pearls are found on which good schools are erected.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
You may regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer, but if you cannot, mind your own business.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whilst the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property are very unequal. Oneman owns his clothes, and another owns a country.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Astronomy taught us our insignificance in Nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let a stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A garden has this advantage, that it makes it indifferent where you live. A well-laid garden makes the face of the country of no account; let that be low or high, grand or mean, you have made a beautiful abode worthy of man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Plato says that the punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is, to live under the government of worse men; and the like regret is suggested to all the auditors, as the penalty of abstaining to speak,--that they shall hear worse orators than themselves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each other up to a high standard. The habit of meeting well-read and knowing men teaches the art of omission and selection.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope of the heart.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In old persons, when thus fully expressed, we often observe a fair, plump, perennial waxen complexion, which indicates that all the ferment of earlier days has subsided into serenity of thought and behavior.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in education.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge; yet not the details, but the quality. What part does he play in them - a cheerful, manly part, or a poor, drivelling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions, they have a substantial truth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is God in you that responds to God without, or affirms his own words trembling on the lips of another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda-these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs.

Ralph Waldo Emerson