Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out ofthe window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; - read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, there is no question of continuance. No inspired man ever asks this question, or condescends to these evidences. For the soul is true to itself, and the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the present, which is infinite, to a future which would be finite.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being? There are men, who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations withthem, and lead the activity of the human race. And if there be such a tie, that, wherever the mind of man goes, nature will accompany him, perhaps there are men whose magnetisms are of that force to draw material and elemental powers, and, where they appear, immense instrumentalities organize around them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of all tools, an observatory is the most sublime.... What is so good in a college as an observatory? The sublime attaches to the door and to the first stair you ascent, that this is the road to the stars.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man, man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Chemistry, which is the analysis of matter, has taught us that we eat gas, drink gas, tread on gas, and are gas.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great is the art,
Great be the manners, of the bard.
He shall not his brain encumber
With the coil of rhythm and number;
But, leaving rule and pale forethought,
He shall aye climb
For his rhyme.
"Pass in, pass in," the angels say

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every day brings a ship, Every ship brings a word; Well for those who have no fear, Looking seaward well assured That the word the vessel brings Is the word they wish to hear.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A poem, a sentence, causes us to see ourselves. I be, and I see my being, at the same time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim... The details, the prose of nature, he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendour.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere as to expect poetry from this engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you follow the suburban fashion in building a sumptuous- looking house for a little money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap, dear house.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,-must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The moral sense is always supported by the permanent interest of the parties. Else, I know not how, in our world, any good would ever get done.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Manners are very communicable: men catch them from each other.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty, that it, has been taken for it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Behold the Sea,
The opaline, the plentiful and strong,
Yet beautiful as is the rose in June,
Fresh as the trickling rainbow of July;
Sea full of food, the nourisher of kinds,
Purger of earth, and medicine of men;
Creating a sweet climate by my breath,
Washing out harms and griefs from memory,
And, in my mathematic ebb and flow,
Giving a hint of that which changes not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Enthusiasm is the height of man; it is the passing from the human to the divine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,--his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,--fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A scholar does not wish to be always pumping his brains; he wants gossips.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Natural religion supplies still all the facts which are disguised under the dogma of popular creeds. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson