Ralph Waldo Emerson - Power Quotes

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Each man too is a tyrant in tendency, because he would impose his idea on others; and their trick is their natural defence. Jesuswould absorb the race; but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of thehuman mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstacy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it... ''Beware of me,'' it says, ''but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a god- like ease and power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A seashell should be the crest of England, not only because it represents a power built on the waves, but also the hard finish ofthe men. The Englishman is finished like a cowry or a murex.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord's power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As I walked in the woods I felt what I often feel that nothing can befall me in life, no calamity, no disgrace (leaving me my eyes) to which Nature will not offer a sweet consolation. Standing on the bare ground with my head bathed by the blithe air, & uplifted into the infinite space, I become happy in my universal relations. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign & accidental. I am the heir of uncontained beauty and power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
To this military attitude of the soul we give the name of Heroism... It is a self-trust which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will...

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
All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Talent for talent's sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What power does Nature not owe to her duration, of amassing infinitesimals into cosmical forces!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Water... transports vast boulders of rock in its iceberg a thousand miles. But its far greater power depends on its talent of becoming little, and entering the smallest holes and pores. By this agency, carrying in solution elements needful to every plant, the vegetable world exists.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
And the glory of character is in affronting the horrors of depravity to draw thence new nobilities of power: as Art lives and thrills in new use and combining of contrasts, and mining into the dark evermore for blacker pits of night.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genius is the power to labor better and more availably. Deserve thy genius: exalt it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain, the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall eagerly convert more than we now possess into means and powers, when we shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy and strangulation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The people know that they need in their representative much more than talent, namely, the power to make his talent trusted.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life,never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoodsman, which all men relish.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The law of nature is: Do the thing and you shall have the power; but they who do not do the thing have not the power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Money often costs too much, and power and pleasure are not cheap.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

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