Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

2,529 Sourced Quotes

A new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons which have given me delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Very idle is all curiosity concerning other people's estimate of us, and all fear of remaining unknown is not less so.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each ofthese works an act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken; that act or step is the spiritual act; all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousand times.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact thatall nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let ideas establish their legitimate sway again in society, let life be fair and poetic, and the scholars will gladly be lovers, citizens, and philanthropists.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends: and in nature is no end; but every thing, at the end of one use, is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial natures.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sleep is not, death is not; Who seem to die Live. House you were born in, Friends of your spring-time, old man and young maid, Day's toil and it's guerdon, They are all vanishing, Fleeing to fables, Cannot be moored

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow, and notlead the character and progress of the citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only who build on Ideas, build for eternity; and that the form of government which prevails, is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Works of the intellect are great only by comparison with each other.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Astronomy... compelled a certain extension and uplifting of our views of the Deity and his Providence. This correction of our superstitions was confirmed by the new science of Geology.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal powers, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us, and which we can love.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But in every constitution some large degree of animal vigor is necessary as material foundation for the higher qualities of the art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Virtue runs before the muse,
and defies her skill;
she is rapt and doth refuse
to wait a painter's will.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The solitary knows the essence of the thought, the scholar in society only its fair face.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Earth's a howling wilderness,
Truculent with fraud and force.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Bring me wine, but wine which never grew
In the belly of the grape

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our health is our sound relation to external objects; our sympathy with external being.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be saidto have arrived at self-possession.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Chide me not, laborious band, For the idle flowers I brought; Every aster in my hand Goes home loaded with a thought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think all men know better than they do; know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles; but they darenot trust their presentiments.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be a football to Time and Chance, the more kicks, the better, so that you inspect the whole game and know its utmost law.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world exists, as I understand it, to teach the science of liberty.

Ralph Waldo Emerson