Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not speak of God much. After a very little conversation on the highest nature, thought deserts us and we run into formalism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
An orchard, good tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a large farmer, not much more fixed than the state of the crop.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her works and delights in startling us with resemblances in the most unexpected quarters.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ants; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step downward, is a step upward. The man who renounceshimself, comes to himself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe: that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man in a cave or in a camp, a nomad, will die with no more estate than the wolf or the horse leaves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best nations are those most widely related; and navigation, as effecting a world-wide mixture, is the most potent advancer ofnations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Books take their place according to their specific gravity as surely as potatoes in a tub.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
To the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running underground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Personal beauty is then first charming and itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions, and not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
An English family consists of a few persons, who, from youth to age, are found revolving within a few feet of each other, as if tied by some invisible ligature, tense as that cartilage which we have seen attaching the two Siamese.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely, and not by the direct stroke: men of genius, but not yetaccredited: one gets the cheer of their light, without paying too great a tax.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Conversation in society is found to be on a platform so low as to exclude science, the saint, and the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sentence must also contain its own apology for being spoken.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mankind have such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his life of thought and prayer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature does not cocker us: we are children, not pets: she is not fond: everything is dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe universal laws.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
How casually and unobservedly we make all our most valued acquaintances.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist. Every thing must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition, to understand any thing rightly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson