Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature (1836)

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.

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

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

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
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
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
There is a property in the horizon which no man has, but he whose eyes can integrate all the parts,--that is, the poet.

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

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

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

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson
"What we know, is a point to what we do not know." Open any recent journal of science, and weigh the problems suggested concerning Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge whether the interest of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted.

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
The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversation; and this is a main function of life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the fruit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As the power or genius of nature is ecstatic, so must its science or the description of it be.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is the end of nature; nothing so easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he; no moss, no lichen is so easilyborn; and he takes along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of society and condition extempore, as an army encamps in a desert, and where all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation, and for love.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I do not wonder at a snowflake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies.

Ralph Waldo Emerson