Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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We owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the seeming gang of gypsies and peddlars.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is commonly said by farmers, that a good pear or apple costs no more time or pains to rear, than a poor one; so I would have no work of art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the best.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The terrible tabulation of the French statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, then, in every twenty thousand, or thirty thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or marries his grandmother.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
By the irresistible maturing of the general mind, the Christian traditions have lost their hold.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Steam was till the other day the devil which we dreaded. Every pot made by any human potter or brazier had a hole in its cover, to let off the enemy, lest he should lift pot and roof and carry the house away.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The domestic man, who loves no music so well as his kitchen clock, and the airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on the hearth, has solaces which others never dream of.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive orbrute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A good form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science on the subject; and a beautiful face sets twenty hearts in palpitation, prior to all consideration of the mechanical proportions of the features and head.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word...

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,--no more. I cannot get it nearer to me.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you. Dante was very badcompany, and was never invited to dinner.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, andthe country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,--travel a whole day together,--looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The affirmative class monopolize the homage of mankind. They originate and execute all the great feats. What a force was coiled upin the skull of Napoleon!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tis the privilege of Art Thus to play its cheerful part, Man on earth to acclimate And bend the exile to his fate.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I like a man who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some play at chess, some at cards, some at the Stock Exchange. I prefer to play at Cause and Effect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not with observation,--a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of God,--he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of all wit's uses, the main one is to live well with who has none.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Keep the town for occasions, but the habits should be formed in retirement.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
And thus ever, behind the coarse effect, is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself the effect of a finer cause.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is instructed in what is set above him. He learns that his being is without bound; that to the good, to the perfect, he is born, low as he now lies in evil and weakness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is in short cycles or periods; we are quickly tired, but we have rapid rallies. A man is spent by his work, starved, prostrate; he will not lift his hand to save his life; he can never think more. He sinks into deep sleep and wakes with renewed youth, with hope, courage, fertile in resources, and keen for daring adventure.

Ralph Waldo Emerson