Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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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
For, rightly, every man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and, whilst I fancied I was criticising him, I was censuring orrather terminating my own soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman - repose in energy. The Greek battle pieces are calm; the heroes, in whatever violent actions engaged, retain a serene aspect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably a doubt of the existence of matter.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the moment when you make the least petition to God, though it be but a silent wish that he may approve you, or add one moment to your life,--do you not, in the very act, necessarily exclude all other beings from your thought? In that act, the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your mind than your brother or your child.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimneyside of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As a man thinketh, so is he, and as a man chooseth, so is he.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whatever we think and say is wonderfully better for our spirits and trust in another mouth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man's crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The craft of the merchant is this bringing a thing where it abounds to where it is costly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The essence of age is intellect. Wherever that appears, we call it old.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we see that it always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the question whether the characters are not significant of themselves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Greek architecture is geometry. Its temples are diagrams in marble, and not appeals to the imagination, like the Gothic - they are powers of the square and cube.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Instead of making Christianity a vehicle of truth, you make truth only a horse for Christianity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Necessity does everything well. In our condition of universal dependence, it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, and to give all that is asked, though at great inconvenience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
England, an old and exhausted island, must one day be contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her children.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Without the great arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the ignorant and childish part of mankind that is the fighting part. Idle and vacant minds want excitement

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In our Mechanics' Fair, there must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenter's planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer instruments,--rain-gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genius seems to consist merely in trueness of sight, in using such words as show that the man was an eye-witness, and not a repeater of what was told.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are. It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the very rich, in a true scale would be found very indigent and ragged.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our life seems not present, so much as prospective; not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast- flowingvigor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

Ralph Waldo Emerson