Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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Any work looks wonderful to me except the one which I can do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thus grows up fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When believers and unbelievers live in the same manner - I distrust the religion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We must leave our pets at home, when we go into the street, and meet men on broad grounds of good meaning and good sense.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society will pardon much to genius and special gifts; but, being in its nature conventional, it loves what is conventional, or what belongs to coming together.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The physician prescribes hesitatingly out of his few resources... If the patient mends, he is glad and surprised.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us day by day and cost us nothing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I will not live out of me I will not see with others' eyes My good is good, my evil ill I would be free.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults overthe moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a persuasion in the soul of man that he is here for cause, that he was put down in this place by the Creator to do the work for which he inspires him, that thus he is an overmatch for all antagonists that could combine against him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Excite the soul, and the weather and the town and your condition in the world all disappear; the world itself loses its solidity, nothing remains but the soul and the Divine Presence in which it lives.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
To clothe the fiery thought
In simple words succeeds,
For still the craft of genius is
To mask a king in weeds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In England every man you meet is some man's son; in America, he may be some man's father.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every discourse is an approximate answer: but it is of small consequence, that we do not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for contemplation forever.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of affection need invade this religion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The remedy for all blunders, the cure of blindness, the cure of crime, is love.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men are not philosophers, but are rather very foolish children, who, by reason of their partiality, see everything in the most absurd manner, and are the victims at all times of the nearest object. There is even no philosopher who is a philosopher at all times. Our experience, our perception is conditioned by the need to acquire in parts and in succession, that is, with every truth a certain falsehood.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I bought my farm, I did not know what a bargain I had in the bluebirds, daffodils and thrushes; as little did I know what sublime mornings and sunsets I was buying.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I honor health as the first muse, and sleep as the condition of health. Sleep benefits mainly by the sound health it produces; incidentally also by dreams, into whose farrago a divine lesson is sometimes slipped.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
He that despiseth small things will perish by little and little.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The society of the energetic class, in their friendly and festive meetings, is full of courage, and of attempts, which intimidatethe pale scholar.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The intelligent have a right over the ignorant; namely, the right of instructing them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is not an arbitrary "decree of God," but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the children of men to live in to-day.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As every pool reflects the image of the sun, so every thought and thing restores us an image and creature of the supreme Good. Theuniverse is perforated by a million channels for his activity. All things mount and mount.

Ralph Waldo Emerson