Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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We do what we can, and then make a theory to prove our performance the best.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him [H.D. Thoreau]. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Show us an arc of the curve, and a good mathematician will find out the whole figure. We are always reasoning from the seen to the unseen.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think the vice of our housekeeping is that it does not hold man sacred. The vice of government, the vice of education, the viceof religion, is one with that of the private life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we callFate.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his countenance, he may abolish all considerations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
All good conversation, manners, and action come from a spontaneity which forgets usages and makes the moment great.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As long as our people quote English standards they dwarf their own proportions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The root of the plant is not unsightly to science...

Ralph Waldo Emerson
All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As much wisdom may be expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdom may be drawn from it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you, if you are great.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
And what avails it that science has come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities, but the incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The religions are obsolete when the reforms do not proceed from them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What a man does, that he has. What has he to do with hope or fear? In himself is his might. Let him regard no good as solid but that which is in his nature, and which must grow out of him as long as he exists. The goods of fortune may come and go like summer leaves; let him scatter them on every wind as the momentary signs of his infinite productiveness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Yankee is one who, if he once gets his teeth set on a thing, all creation can't make him let go.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though your views are in straight antagonism to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume that you are saying precisely thatwhich all think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The frost which kills the harvest of a year saves the harvest of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The time is coming when all men will see that the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting, overpowering, excluding sanctity, buta sweet, natural goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to be and to grow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible, are comely, as they take their place in the pictures of memory.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fashion which affects to be honor, is often, in all men's experience, only a ballroom-code.

Ralph Waldo Emerson