Ralph Waldo Emerson - Mind Quotes

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All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs, by imitation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the current of events, and strong with their strength.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We hear eagerly every thought and word quoted from an intellectual man. But in his presence our own mind is roused to activity, and we forget very fast what he says.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The land is the appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our culture...food for our mind, as well as our body.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cowardice shuts the eyes till the sky is not larger than a calf-skin: shuts the eyes so that we cannot see the horse that is running away with us; worse, shuts the eyes of the mind and chills the heart.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
People who wash much have a high mind about it, and talk down to those who wash little.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The restraining grace of common sense is the mark of all valid minds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses with truths that have always been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian, than with persons in the house.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
How calmly and genially the mind apprehends one after another the laws of Physics!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of someone's mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare,--muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
You may regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer, but if you cannot, mind your own business.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope of the heart.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being? There are men, who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations withthem, and lead the activity of the human race. And if there be such a tie, that, wherever the mind of man goes, nature will accompany him, perhaps there are men whose magnetisms are of that force to draw material and elemental powers, and, where they appear, immense instrumentalities organize around them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,-must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the moment when you make the least petition to God, though it be but a silent wish that he may approve you, or add one moment to your life,--do you not, in the very act, necessarily exclude all other beings from your thought? In that act, the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your mind than your brother or your child.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the ignorant and childish part of mankind that is the fighting part. Idle and vacant minds want excitement

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The word unto the prophet spoken Was writ on tablets yet unbroken: The word by seers or sibyls told, In groves of oak or fanes of gold, Still floats upon the morning wind, Still whispers to the willing mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth is always present; it only needs to lift the iron lids of the mind's eye to read its oracles.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am so much a Unitarian as this: that I believe the human mind can admit but one God, and that every effort to pay religious homage to more than one being goes to take away all right ideas.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
By the irresistible maturing of the general mind, the Christian traditions have lost their hold.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is instructed in what is set above him. He learns that his being is without bound; that to the good, to the perfect, he is born, low as he now lies in evil and weakness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson