Ralph Waldo Emerson - Man Quotes

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A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us,--kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron show,--the rootsof all things are in man.

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
But in our experience, man is cheap and friendship wants its deep sense. We affect to dwell with our friends in their absence, but we do not; when deed, word, or letter comes not, they let us go.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name; the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish.

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
What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though love repine, and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply, —
"'Tis man's perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die."

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the man than blueberries.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no luster as you turn it in your hand, until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As a man thinketh, so is he, and as a man chooseth, so is he.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.

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
Any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile either on persons, or opinions, or possessions.

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
Science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction.

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
A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Buddhist, who thanks no man, who says "Do not flatter your benefactors," but who, in his conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a threadball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains on the thrower

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.

Ralph Waldo Emerson