Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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Only those books come down which deserve to last. All the gilt edges, vellum and morocco, all the presentation copies to all the libraries will not preserve a book in circulation beyond its intrinsic date.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to conceal, his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into that as into any which he publishes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
You cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have served him, he at once puts you in debt by his magnanimity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The height of the pinnacle is determined by the breadth of the base.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I with my hammer pounding evermore The rocky coast, smite Andes into dust, Strewing by beds and, in another age, Rebuild a continent for better men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
To eat bread is one thing; to love the precepts of Christ and resolve to obey them is quite another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing of the common heart.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Egotism is a kind of buckram that gives momentary strength and concentration to men, and seems to be much used in Nature for fabrics in which local and spasmodic energy is required.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The great mother Nature will not quite tell her secret to the coach or the steamboat, but says, One to one, my dear, is my rule also, and I keep my enchantments and oracles for the religious soul coming alone, or as good as alone, in true-love.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
God never jests with us, and will not compromise the end of nature, by permitting any inconsequence in its procession.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Think me not unkind and rude
That I walk alone in grove and glen;
I go to the god of the wood
To fetch his word to men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds;the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints, which speak to the intelligent.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
You must treat the days respectfully, you must be a day yourself, and not interrogate it like a college professor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes uppermost, and, because he says every thing, saying, at last, something good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is nothing whimsical or fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many frivolous people, who make up society, are organic, and society is a hospital of incurables.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Therefore all just persons are satisfied with their own praise. They refuse to explain themselves, and are content that new actions should do them that office. They believe that we communicate without speech, and above speech, and that no right action of ours is quite unaffecting to our friends, at whatever distance; for the influence of action is not to be measured by miles.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of immortality, the soul, when well employed, is incurious. It is so well, that it is sure that it will be well. It asks no questions of the Supreme Power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The energetic action of the times develops individualism, and the religious appear isolated. I esteem this a step in the right direction. Heaven deals with us on no representative system. Souls are not saved in bundles.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads, and an abstract of the codes of nations would be an abstract of the common conscience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is well done, I feel as if I did; what is ill-done, I reck not of.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.

Ralph Waldo Emerson