Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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A man must know how to estimate a sour face. The sour face of the multitude, like thier sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and the newspaper directs.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do you love me? Means at last do you see the same truth I see? If you do, we are happy together; but when presently one of us passes into the perception of a new truth, we are divorced and the force of all nature cannot hold us to each other.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Moller, in his Essay on Architecture, taught that the building which was fitted accurately to answer its end would turn out to be beautiful, though beauty had not been intended. I find the like unity in human structures rather virulent and pervasive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let not the author eat up the man, so that he shall be all balcony and no house.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is noticed, that the consideration of the great periods and spaces of astronomy induces a dignity of mind, and an indifferenceto death.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As we refine, our checks become finer. If we rise to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The hero sees that the event is ancillary: it must follow him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Under the dominion of an idea, which possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil freedom, or the religious sentiment, the power ofpersons are no longer subjects of calculation. A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom, or conquest, can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagant actions, out of all proportion to their means; as, the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the French have done.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its thought in a thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is bad enough that our geniuses cannot do anything useful, but it is worse that no man is fit for society who has fine traits.He is admired at a distance, but he cannot come near without appearing a cripple.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The poor and the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. "Blessed be nothing," and "The worse things are, the better they are," are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Very few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior quadruped organization. We call these millions men; but they are not yet men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all the music that can be brought to disengage him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
He is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor; and how to give access to themasterpieces of art and nature, is the problem of civilization.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed, by, as a loss of power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think I have done well, if I have acquired a new word from a good author; and my business with him is to find my own, though itwere only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his talents, that constitutes friendship and character. The man thatstands by himself, the universe stands by him also.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth, his eye is as clear as the heavens. When he has base ends, and speaks falsely, the eye is muddy, and sometimes asquint.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is health in table talk and nursery play. We must wear old shoes and have aunts and cousins.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man finds a sanction for his simplest claims and deeds, in decisions of his own mind, which he calls Truth and Holiness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is the end of human life? It is not, believe me, the chief end of man that he should make a fortune and beget children whose end is likewise to make a fortune, but it is, in few words, that he should explore himself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson