Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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The superstition respecting power and office is going to the ground. The stream of human affairs flows its own way, and is very little affected by the activity of legislators. What great masses of men wish done, will be done; and they do not wish it for a freak, but because it is their state and natural end.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is very certain that the strong British race which has now overrun much of this continent, must also overrun [Texas], and Mexico and Oregon also, and it will in the course of ages be of small import by what particular occasions and methods it was done.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man should not go where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society with him,Mnot bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but atmospherically. He should preserve in a new company the same attitude of mind and reality of relation, which his daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest club.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is said, no man can write but one book; and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its impression on all his performances.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Perhaps it is the lowest of the qualities of an orator, but it is, on so many occasions, of chief importance,--a certain robust and radiant physical health; or--shall I say?--great volumes of animal heat.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Invention breeds invention. No sooner is the electric telegraph devised than gutta-percha, the very material it requires, is found. The aeronaut is provided with gun-cotton, the very fuel he wants for his balloon.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth is too simple for us: we do not like those who unmask our illusions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a natural king becomes a titular king, every body is pleased and satisfied.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In spite of Virtue and the Muse,
Nemesis will have her dues,
And all our struggles and our toils
Tighter wind the giant coils.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Americans have many virtues, but they have not Faith and Hope. I know no two words whose meaning is more lost sight of.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design;--and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man beholds his human condition with a degree of melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man, imprisonedin mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming events.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the order of nature, we cannot render benefits to those from whom we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefit we receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent for cent, to somebody. Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Can rules or tutors educate
The semigod whom we await?
He must be musical,
Tremulous, impressional,
Alive to gentle influence
Of landscape and of sky
And tender to the spirit-touch
Of man's or maiden's eye.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society cannot do without cultivated men. As soon as the first wants are satisfied, the higher wants become imperative.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The child amidst his baubles is learning the action of light, motion, gravity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our own spontaneous expression with good humored inflexibility whether the whole cry of voices is on the other side.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beside all the moral benefit which we may expect from the farmer's profession, when a man enters it considerately, this promised the conquering of the soil, plenty, and beyond this, the adorning of the country with every advantage and ornament which labor, ingenuity, and affection for a man's home, could suggest.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or mother's life?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
He is a good man, who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of beat.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt thespeaker and the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.

Ralph Waldo Emerson