Ralph Waldo Emerson - God Quotes

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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
God will have life to be real; we will be damned, but it shall be theatrical.

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
As Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we know the particular thing, and every thing, and every man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made--no matter how indirectly--to numbers, proclamation is then and there made, that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet, enveloping presence, who shall dare to come in?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a god- like ease and power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The bulk of mankind believe in two gods. They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion; but in mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come under another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The whole world is an omen and a sign. Why look so wistfully in a corner? Man is the Image of God. Why run after a ghost or a dream? The voice of divination resounds everywhere and runs to waste unheard, unregarded, as the mountains echo with the bleatings of cattle.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Spartans, stoics, heroes, saints, and gods use a short and positive speech.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
My own mind is the direct revelation which I have from God and far least liable to mistake in telling his will of any revelation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is too short to waste
The critic bite or cynic bark,
Quarrel, or reprimand;
'Twill soon be dark;
Up! mind thine own aim, and
God speed the mark!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only money of God is God. He never pays with any thing less, or any thing else.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wise cultivated, genial conversation is the last flower of civilization, and the best result which life has to offer us,--a cup for gods, which has no repentance. Conversation is our account of ourselves. All we have, all we can, all we know, is brought into play, and as the reproduction in finer form, of all our havings.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition from that which is representable to the senses, to that which is not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not with observation,--a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of God,--he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.

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
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
But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson