Ralph Waldo Emerson - Man Quotes

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe: that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.

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 key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man ever came to an experience which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
For, rightly, every man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and, whilst I fancied I was criticising him, I was censuring orrather terminating my own soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or a mollusk, and isolated it-which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation.

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
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
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Many times the reading of a book has made the future of a man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

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
To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of charactermakes the state unnecessary. The wise man is the State.

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
The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

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

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
In every man's memory, with the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books which met his views.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, — seven or eight ancestors at least, — and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.

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