Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly adds to our power and enlarges our field of action.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The question is whether [suicide] is the way out, or the way in.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young
And always keep us so.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous organ. It will flow out of your actions, your manners, and your face. It will bring you friendships. It will impledge you to truth by the love and expectation of generous minds. By virtue of the laws of that Nature, which is one and perfect, it shall yield every sincere good that is in the soul, to the scholar beloved of earth and heaven.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our first mistake is the belief that the circumstance gives the joy which we give to the circumstance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Venus, when her son was lost,
Cried him up and down the coast,
In hamlets, palaces, and parks,
And told the truant by his marks,-
Golden curls, and quiver, and bow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep and pass and turn again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The moral sense reappears today with the same morning newness that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say there is no religion now. 'Tis like saying in rainy weather, There is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of its superlative effects.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
How painful to give a gift to any person of sensibility, or of equality! It is next worst to receiving one

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, — now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned.

Ralph Waldo Emerson