Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

2,529 Sourced Quotes

We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful; and the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath like space and time, make all matter gay.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cities of mortals woe-begone Fantastic care derides, But in the serious landscape lone Stern benefit abides.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men of character are the conscience of the society to which they belong.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Remarkable trait in the American Character is the union, not very infrequent, of Yankee cleverness with spiritualism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord's power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Unhappily, no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The divine gift is ever the instant life, which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for recomposition.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Profound sincerity is the only basis of talent as of character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
For he that feeds men serveth few;
He serves all who dares be true.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thanks to the morning light, Thanks to the foaming sea, To the uplands of New Hampshire, To the green-haired forest free.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In excited conversation we have glimpses of the universe, hints of power native to the soul, far-darting lights and shadows of an Andes landscape, such as we can hardly attain in lone meditation. Here are oracles sometimes profusely given, to which the memory goes back in barren hours.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
For the existing world is not a dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as a dream; neither is it a disease; but it is the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life,never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoodsman, which all men relish.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Religion must always be a crab fruit; it cannot be grafted, and keep its wild beauty.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a man thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. All spontaneous thought is irrespective of all else.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A state of war or anarchy, in which law has little force, is so far valuable, that it puts every man on trial. The man of principle is known as such, and even in the fury of faction is respected.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion,not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ah Fate, cannot a man Be wise without a beard? East, West, from Beer to Dan, Say, was it never heard That wisdom might in youth be gotten, Or wit be ripe before 't was rotten?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The cannon will not suffer any other sound to be heard for miles and for years around it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson