Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, while he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Circles, like the soul, are neverending and turn round and round without a stop

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Each the herald is who wrote
His rank, and quartered his own coat.
There is no king nor sovereign state
That can fix a hero's rate.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly back to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature. Nature is manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, the many.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
He has seen but half the universe who has not been shown the house of pain.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Women see better than men. Men see lazily, if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball where everyone hides his real character, then reveals it by hiding

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The crime which bankrupts men and states is job-work-declining from your main design, to serve a turn here and there. Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the direction of your life, nothing is great or desirable if it is off from that. I think we are entitled here to draw a straight line and say that society can never prosper but must always be bankrupts, until every man does that which he was created to do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you are wise, you will dread a prosperity which only loads you with more.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
O tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire;
One morn is in the mighty heaven,
And one in our desire.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No doubt, to a man of sense, travel offers advantages. As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man. A foreign country is a point of comparison, wherefrom to judge his own.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I like a church, I like a cowl,
I love a prophet of the soul,
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles;
Yet not for all his faith can see,
Would I that cowled churchman be.
Why should the vest on him allure,
Which I could not on me endure?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

Ralph Waldo Emerson