Ralph Waldo Emerson - God Quotes

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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
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
When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions. Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God have, from time to time, walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and rustle of the corn.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The God who made New Hampshire
Taunted the lofty land
With little men.

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
If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as spiritual life, God, soul, cross, etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
God Himself does not speak prose, but communicates with us by hints, omens, inference, and dark resemblances in objects lying all around us.

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
Fear not, then, thou child infirm;
There's no god dare wrong a worm.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Will is the measure of power. To a great genius there must be a great will. If the thought is not a lamp to the will, does not proceed to an act, the wise are imbecile. He alone is strong and happy who has a will. The rest are herds. He uses; they are used. He is of the Maker; they are of the Made. Will is always miraculous, being the presence of God to men. When it appears in a man he is a hero, and all metaphysics are at fault.

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
God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation.

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
I am primarily engaged to myself to be a public servant of all the gods, to demonstrate to all men that there is intelligence andgood will at the heart of all things, and even higher and yet higher leadings. These are my engagements; how can your law further or hinder me in what I shall do to men?

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
If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none. If there is grandeur in you, you will find grandeur in porters and sweeps.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love is omnipresent in nature as motive and reward. Love is our highest word and the synonym of God.

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
Live in the fields, and God will give you lectures on natural philosophy every day.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors and recites fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God.

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

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
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
Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The time is coming when all men will see that the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting, overpowering, excluding sanctity, buta sweet, natural goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to be and to grow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All.

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