Ralph Waldo Emerson - Day Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

View all Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Live in the fields, and God will give you lectures on natural philosophy every day.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is man born for but to be a Reformer, a Remaker of what man has made? A renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good? Imitating that great Nature which embossoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, with every breath a new life?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The socialism of our day has done good service in setting men to thinking how certain civilizing benefits, now only enjoyed by theopulent, can be enjoyed by all.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,
Plans, credit, and the muse;
Nothing refuse.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
With most men, scarce a link of memory holds yesterday and to-day together.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are days when the great are near us, when there is no frown on their brow, no condescension even; when they take us by the hand, and we share their thought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short.

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
Instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world shall last his days.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Each philosopher, each bard, each actor has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Flowers so strictly belong to youth, that we adult men soon come to feel, that their beautiful generations concern not us: we havehad our day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use in broad day. The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to those who do not respect themselves. I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Solitary converse with nature; for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
Night-dreams trace on Memory's wall Shadows of the thoughts of day, And thy fortunes, as they fall, The bias of the will betray.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The horseman serves the horse,
The neatherd serves the neat,
The merchant serves the purse,
The eater serves his meat;
'T is the day of the chattel,
Web to weave, and corn to grind;
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every day brings a ship, Every ship brings a word; Well for those who have no fear, Looking seaward well assured That the word the vessel brings Is the word they wish to hear.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The two parties which divide the State, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made … Now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities … Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the pause on the last movement.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
By virtue of the Deity thought renews itself inexhaustibly every day and the thing whereon it shines, though it were dust and sand, is a new subject with countless relations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Would we codify the laws that should reign in households, and whose daily transgression annoys and mortifies us, and degrades our household life, we must adorn every day with sacrifices. Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are thevictims of these details, and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I feel in regard to this aged England…that she sees a little better on a cloudy day, and that, in storm of battle and calamity, she has a secret vigour and a pulse like a cannon.

Ralph Waldo Emerson