Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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Our reliance on the physician is a kind of despair of ourselves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes never so long.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Come out of the azure. Love the day. Do not leave the sky out of your landscape.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am so much a Unitarian as this: that I believe the human mind can admit but one God, and that every effort to pay religious homage to more than one being goes to take away all right ideas.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But I shall hear without pain, that I play the courtier very ill, and talk of that which I do not well understand.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Lovers should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion and meanness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The terrors of the child are quite reasonable, and add to his loveliness; for his utter ignorance and weakness, and his enchanting indignation on such a small basis of capital compel every bystander to take his part.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of the world is the tie between person and event. Person makes event and event person.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our civility, England determines the style of, inasmuch as England is the strongest of the family of existing nations, and as we are the expansion of that people. It is that of a trading nation; it is a shopkeeping civility. The English lord is a retired shopkeeper, and has the prejudices and timidities of that profession.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What care though rival cities soar
Along the stormy coast,
Penn's town, New York, Baltimore,
If Boston knew the most!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Test of the poet is knowledge of love,
For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove;
Never was poet, of late or of yore,
Who was not tremulous with love-lore.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is it any better if the student... aims to make a mechanical whole of.,.science... by a numerical addition of all the facts that fall within his vision.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men aboutus are dupes. But life is a sincerity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A strong person makes the law and custom null before his own will.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Logic is the procession or proportionate unfolding of the intuition; but its virtue is as silent method; the moment it would appear as propositions, and have a separate value, it is worthless.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are faces so fluid with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, that we can hardly find what the mere features really are. When the delicious beauty of lineament loses its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has appeared, that an interior and durable form has been disclosed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We say that every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment. We measure our friends so. We know, they have intervals of folly, whereof we take no heed, but wait the reappearings of the genius, which are sure and beautiful.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Economy does not consist in saving the coal, but in using the time while it burns.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our faith comes in moments... yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock aswell as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common, with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Character repudiates intellect, yet excites it; and character passes into thought, is published so, and then is ashamed before newflashes of moral worth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson