Ralph Waldo Emerson - Eyes Quotes

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In his [the writer's] eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported.

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
Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate, — and meantime it is only puss and her tail. How long before our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter, and shouting, and we shall find it was a solitary performance?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates as fast as the sun breeds clouds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generation beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let him be great, and love shall follow him. Nothing is more deeply punished than the neglect of the affinities by which alone society should be formed, and the insane levity of choosing associates by others eyes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
'Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth. Those laws do not stop where our eyes lose them, but push the same geometry and chemistry up into the invisible plane of social and rational life, so that, look where we will, in a boy's game, or in the strifes of races, a perfect reaction, a perpetual judgment keeps watch and ward.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Born for success he seemed,
With grace to win, with heart to hold,
With shining gifts that took all eyes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes never so long.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The solid, solid universe
Is pervious to Love;
With bandaged eyes he never errs,
Around, below, above.
His blinding light
He flingeth white
On God's and Satan's brood,
And reconciles
By mystic wiles
The evil and the good.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man passes for that he is worth. What he is engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his fortunes, in letters of light. Concealment avails him nothing; boasting nothing. There is confession in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the grasp of hands.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
An eye can threaten like a loaded and leveled gun, or can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance with joy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is what it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.

Ralph Waldo Emerson