Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

2,527 Sourced Quotes

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
For it is not meters, but a metermaking argument that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

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
There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

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
Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and at the same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.

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
The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness, - an open and noble temper.

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
Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

Ralph Waldo Emerson