Ralph Waldo Emerson - Truth Quotes

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The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please—you can never have both.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The highest compact we can make with our fellow, is, — "Let there be truth between us two forevermore".

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatness, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is a man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what has been made, a denouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions. Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God have, from time to time, walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Explore, and explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise yourself, nor accept another's dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The true philosopher and the true poet are one,
and a beauty, which is truth,
and a truth, which is beauty,
is the aim of both.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.

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
Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

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
Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision, there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the existing generation is invalided and degenerate? … A more subtle and severe criticism might suggest that some dislocation has befallen the race; that men are off their centre; that multitudes of men do not live with Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The truth, the hope of any time, must always be sought in minorities.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ever from one who comes tomorrow
Men wait their good and truth to borrow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If I have renounced the search of truth, if I have come into the port of some pretending dogmatism, some new church, some Schelling or Cousin, I have died to all use of these new events that are born out of prolific time into multitude of life every hour. I am as bankrupt to whom brilliant opportunities offer in vain. He has just foreclosed his freedom, tied his hands, locked himself up and given the key to another to keep.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.

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
Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous organ. It will flow out of your actions, your manners, and your face. It will bring you friendships. It will impledge you to truth by the love and expectation of generous minds. By virtue of the laws of that Nature, which is one and perfect, it shall yield every sincere good that is in the soul, to the scholar beloved of earth and heaven.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson