Top 100 Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
#1. There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#2. A sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal powers, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us, and which we can love.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#3. In inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things, the highest reason is always the truest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#5. The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#6. In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#7. The man is the head of the house but the woman is the neck that turns the head.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#8. It takes a good deal of character to judge a person by his future instead of his past
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#9. What opium is instilled into all disaster? It shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no rough rasping friction,but the most slippery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#10. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#11. Spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. True prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#13. The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#14. There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest good men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#15. Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#16. Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is what it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#17. Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or town. The broad ethics of Jesus were quickly narrowed to village theologies, which preach an election or favoritism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#18. Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#19. Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#23. I will no longer confer, differ, refer, defer, prefer, or suffer. I renounce the whole tribe of fero. I embrace absolute life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#24. The wings of Time are black and white,
Pied with morning and with night.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#26. I think no virtue goes with size;The reason of all cowardiceIs, that men are overgrown,And, to be valiant, must come downTo the titmouse dimension.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#30. The regular course of studies, the years of academical and professional education, have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin School.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#32. As every pool reflects the image of the sun, so every thought and thing restores us an image and creature of the supreme Good. Theuniverse is perforated by a million channels for his activity. All things mount and mount.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#33. Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is due to the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#34. Let the man stand on his feet. Let religion cease to be occasional; and the pulses of thought that go to the borders of the universe, let them proceed from the bosom of the Household.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#36. When a man says to me, "I have the intensest love of nature," at once I know that he has none.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#37. Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or the public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not from the necessity of sale - who writes always to the unknown friend.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#38. I suppose an entire cabinet of shells would be an expression of the whole human mind; a Flora of the whole globe would be so likewise, or a history of beasts; or a painting of all the aspects of the clouds. Everything is significant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#39. Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. This limbo and dust-hole of thought is presided over by a certain reason, too.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#40. A human being should beware how he laughs, for then he shows all his faults.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#41. Power obeys reality, and not appearances; power is according to quality, and not quantity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#44. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#45. In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#46. But I shall hear without pain, that I play the courtier very ill, and talk of that which I do not well understand.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#47. But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought from age to age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#48. We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent wasa youthful effervescence which we have now lost.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#50. 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
#51. In Scotland, there is a rapid loss of all grandeur of mien and manners; a provincial eagerness and acuteness appear; the poverty of the country makes itself remarked, and a coarseness of manners; and, among the intellectual, is the insanity of dialectics.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#52. Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#55. There is nothing in history to parallel the influence of Jesus Christ.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#57. A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates as fast as the sun breeds clouds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#58. Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general law only a particular fact of some more general law presently to disclose itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#59. The years in your life
are less important
than the life in your years.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#62. Thanks to the morning light, Thanks to the foaming sea, To the uplands of New Hampshire, To the green-haired forest free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#65. Your genuine action will explain itself, and
will explain your other genuine actions.
Your conformity explains nothing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#66. The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#67. I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#68. Wisdom is not found with those who dwell at their ease; rather nature, when she adds brain, adds difficulty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#69. The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that astonish.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#70. [Whenever the average intellect of the clergy declines in the balance with the average intellect of the people] the churches will be shut up and a new order of things [will] begin.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#71. the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#72. Let ideas establish their legitimate sway again in society, let life be fair and poetic, and the scholars will gladly be lovers, citizens, and philanthropists.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#73. The cure for false theology is motherwit. Forget your books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#74. The age of puberty is a crisis in the age of man worth studying. It is the passage from the unconscious to the conscious; from thesleep of passions to their rage.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#77. As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#78. Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#79. In spite of Virtue and the Muse,
Nemesis will have her dues,
And all our struggles and our toils
Tighter wind the giant coils.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#80. I covet truth; beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#81. An answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#83. The Americans have many virtues, but they have not Faith and Hope. I know no two words whose meaning is more lost sight of.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#84. The first questions are always to be asked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitiveness of a child.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#86. A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#87. Things have their laws as well as men, and things refuse to be trifled with.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#90. You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#91. Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#93. The forest waves, the morning breaks,
The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,
Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be
And life pulsates in rock or tree.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#94. I DO not count the hours I spend In wandering by the sea; The forest is my loyal friend, Like God it useth me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#96. Cannot we let [children] be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another you. One's enough.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#97. By going one step further back in thought, discordant opinions are reconciled by being seen to be two extremes of one principle, and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still higher vision.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#98. Love is like wildflowers;
It's often found in the most unlikely places.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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