Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature (1836)

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Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
And thus ever, behind the coarse effect, is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself the effect of a finer cause.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, andthe country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,--travel a whole day together,--looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of the world is the tie between person and event. Person makes event and event person.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our reliance on the physician is a kind of despair of ourselves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geological structure of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all men's thinkings run laterally, never vertically.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world leaves no track in space, and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast idea.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. He is strong, not to do, but to live; not in his arms, but in his heart; not as an agent, but as a fact.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
How much we forgive to those who yield us the rare spectacle of heroic manners! We will pardon them the want of books, or arts, and even of gentler virtues. How tenaciously we remember them!

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The scholar may lose himself in schools, in words, and become a pedant; but when he comprehends his duties, he above all men is arealist, and converses with things.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world; I ask, When shall I die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeinga Universe which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grandand immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence.

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
There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains...

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The squirrel hoards nuts and the bee gathers honey, without knowing what they do, and they are thus provided for without selfishness or disgrace.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably a doubt of the existence of matter.

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
Men are not philosophers, but are rather very foolish children, who, by reason of their partiality, see everything in the most absurd manner, and are the victims at all times of the nearest object. There is even no philosopher who is a philosopher at all times. Our experience, our perception is conditioned by the need to acquire in parts and in succession, that is, with every truth a certain falsehood.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In our Mechanics' Fair, there must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenter's planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer instruments,--rain-gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Manners are very communicable: men catch them from each other.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature.

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