Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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The whole constitution of property on its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons deteriorating and degrading.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The new statement will comprise the skepticisms, as well as the faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For, skepticisms are not gratuitous or lawless, but are limitations of the affirmative statement, and the new philosophy must take them in, and make affirmations outside of them, just as much as must include the oldest beliefs.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the man than blueberries.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art is the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
An artist spends himself like the crayon in his hand, till he is all gone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Pain is superficial, and therefore fear is. The torments of martyrdoms are probably most keenly felt by the by-standers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are such lovers of self-reliance, that we excuse in a man many sins, if he will show us a complete satisfaction in his position, which asks no leave to be, of mine, or any man's good opinion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The people know that they need in their representative much more than talent, namely, the power to make his talent trusted.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creepinto a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men who know the same things are not long the best company for each other.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
All the fairy tales of Aladdin, or the invisible Gyges, or the talisman that opens kings' palaces, or the enchanted halls underground or in the sea, are only fictions to indicated the one miracle of intellectual enlargement.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The charm of the best courages is that they are inventions, inspirations, flashes of genius.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man's fortunes are the fruit of his character. A man's friends are his magnetisms.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Private, accidental, confidential conversation breeds thought. Clubs produce oftener words.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But also the constituency determines the vote of the representative. He is not only representative, but participant. Like can onlybe known by like. The reason why he knows about them is, that he is of them; he has just come out of nature, or from being a part of the thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If with love thy heart has burned;
If thy love is unreturned;
Hide thy grief within thy breast,
Though it tear thee unexpressed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
He who has acquired the ability, may wait securely the occasion of making it felt and appreciated, and know that it will not loiter.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say on both sides,and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The river knows the way to the sea:
Without a pilot it runs and falls,
Blessing all lands with its charity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
For, truly speaking, whoever provokes me to a good act or thought has given me a pledge of his fidelity to virtue,--he has come under the bonds to adhere to that cause to which we are jointly attached.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When fear enters the heart of a man at hearing the names of candidates and the reading of laws that are proposed, then is the State safe, but when these things are heard without regard, as above or below us, then is the Commonwealth sick or dead.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The whole world is an omen and a sign. Why look so wistfully in a corner? Man is the Image of God. Why run after a ghost or a dream? The voice of divination resounds everywhere and runs to waste unheard, unregarded, as the mountains echo with the bleatings of cattle.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Something is wanting to science until it has been humanized.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The great majority of men grow up and grow old in seeming and following.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature, as we know her, is no saint.... She comes eating and drinking and sinning.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson