Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It never was in the power of any man or any community to call the arts into being. They come to serve his actual wants, never to please his fancy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As every man is hunted by his own daemon, vexed by his own disease, this checks all his activity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature never rhymes her children, nor makes two men alike. When we see a great man, we fancy a resemblance to some historical person, and predict the sequel of his character and fortune, a result which he is sure to disappoint. None will ever solve the problem of his character according to our prejudice, but only in his high unprecedented way.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fear, when your friends say to you what you have done well, and say it through; but when they stand with uncertain timid looks of respect and half-dislike, and must suspend their judgement for years to come, you may begin to hope.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The civility of the world has reached that pitch that their more moral genius is becoming indispensable, and the quality of this race is to be honored for itself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good, is vicious.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light, is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie,--an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
My own mind is the direct revelation which I have from God and far least liable to mistake in telling his will of any revelation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let the amelioration in our laws of property proceed from the concession of the rich, not from the grasping of the poor. Let us understand that the equitable rule is, that no one should take more than his share, let him be ever so rich.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces, which expose the whole movement.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveler, who says anywhere but here.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
And what is Genius but finer love, a love impersonal, a love of the flower and perfection of things, and a desire to draw a new picture or copy of the same? It looks to the cause and life: it proceeds from within outward, whilst Talent goes from without inward.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As picture teaches the colouring, so sculpture the anatomy of form.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is the prisoner of his power. A topical memory makes him an almanac; a talent for debate, disputant; skill to get money makes him a miser, that is, a beggar. Culture reduces these inflammations by invoking the aid of other powers against the dominant talent, and by appealing to the rank of powers. It watches success.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown him. He snaps his fingers at laws; and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, "All summer in the field, and all winter in the study." And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The "times," "the age" what is that, but a few profound persons and a few active persons who epitomize the times?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to love the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love Him was happiness;--to love Him in others' virtues.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When he has seen, that it is not his, nor any man's, but it is the soul which made the world, and that it is all accessible to him, he will know that he, as its minister, may rightfully hold all things subordinate and answerable to it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As sunbeams stream through liberal space And nothing jostle or displace, So waved the pine-tree through my thought And fanned the dreams it never brought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general law only a particular fact of some more general law presently to disclose itself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is a frugal mother, and never gives without measure. When she has work to do, she qualifies men for that and sends them equipped.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper, the mailbag, a college, a book or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the soil; everything goes to decay.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Profounder, profounder, Man's spirit must dive; To his aye-rolling orbit No goal will arrive; The heavens that now draw him With sweetness untold, Once found - for new heavens He spurneth the old.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors and recites fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
For every seeing soul, there are two absorbing facts - I, and the abyss.

Ralph Waldo Emerson