Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Science is a search after identity, and the scientific whim is lurking in all corners.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the fruit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions; the surest poison is time. This cup which nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science; especially it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sea is the chemist that dissolves the mountains and the rocks, pulverizes old continents and builds new, forever redistributing the solid matter of the globe.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
All things are flowing, even those that seem immovable. The adamant is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe the materialswhich they want from the air and the ground. They burn, that is, exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth again. The animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual consumption. The earth burns, the mountains burn and decompose, slower, but incessantly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the duty of men to judge men only by their actions. Our faculties furnish us with no means of arriving at the motive, the character, the secret self. We call the tree good from its fruits, and the man, from his works.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As the power or genius of nature is ecstatic, so must its science or the description of it be.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the dissenter, the theorist, the aspirant, who is quitting this ancient domain to embark on seas of adventure, who engages our interest. Omitting then for the present all notice of the stationary class, we shall find that the movement party divides itself into two classes, the actors, and the students.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after long time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The teaching of politics is that the Government, which was set for protection and comfort of all good citizens, becomes the principal obstruction and nuisance with which we have to contend... The cheat and bully and malefactor we meet everywhere is the Government.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am present at the sowing of the seed of the world. With a geometry of sunbeams, the soul lays the foundations of nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What opium is instilled into all disaster? It shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no rough rasping friction,but the most slippery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Without looking, then, to those extraordinary social influences which are now acting in precisely this direction, but only at whatis inevitably doing around us, I think we must regard the land as a commanding and increasing power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
See only that thou work and thou canst not escape the reward.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; the key to all ages is - Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The great man is not convulsible or tormentable; events pass over him without much impression.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is the end of nature; nothing so easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he; no moss, no lichen is so easilyborn; and he takes along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of society and condition extempore, as an army encamps in a desert, and where all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation, and for love.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The subject is said to have the property of making dull men eloquent.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed by translating it into all tongues.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Freedom is the essence of this faith. It has for its object simply to make men good and wise. Its institutions then should be as flexible as the wants of men. That form out of which the life and suitableness have departed should be as worthless in its eyes as the dead leaves that are falling around us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
To me, however, the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their opposition. We can only obey our own polarity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
My garden is a forest ledge
Which older forest s bound;
The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge,
Then plunge to depths profound!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I do not wonder at a snowflake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies.

Ralph Waldo Emerson