Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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On bravely through the sunshine and the showers!
Time hath his work to do, and we have ours.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If I have renounced the search of truth, if I have come into the port of some pretending dogmatism, some new church, some Schelling or Cousin, I have died to all use of these new events that are born out of prolific time into multitude of life every hour. I am as bankrupt to whom brilliant opportunities offer in vain. He has just foreclosed his freedom, tied his hands, locked himself up and given the key to another to keep.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The greatest meliorator of the world is selfish, huckstering Trade.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We die of words. We are hanged, drawn and quartered by dictionaries. We walk in the vale of shadows. It is an age of hobgoblins.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The good rain, like a bad preacher, does not know when to leave off.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am grown by sympathy a little eager and sentimental, but leave me alone, and I should relish every hour and what it brought me, the pot-luck of the day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar-room.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Memory is the thread on which the beads of man are strung, making the personal identity: and it is necessary to moral action.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The solid, solid universe
Is pervious to Love;
With bandaged eyes he never errs,
Around, below, above.
His blinding light
He flingeth white
On God's and Satan's brood,
And reconciles
By mystic wiles
The evil and the good.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The merit claimed for the Anglican Church is that,
if you let it alone,
it will let you alone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of poetry is never explained - is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The days.... come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am afraid the remark is too honest, and comes from the same origin as the maxim of the tyrant, "If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused." I notice too, that the ground on which eminent public servants urge the claims of popular education is fear: "This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats."

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

Ralph Waldo Emerson