Top 100 Emerson Nature Quotes
#2. I am present at the sowing of the seed of the world. With a geometry of sunbeams, the soul lays the foundations of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#3. That which we persist on doing becomes easier, not that the nature of the task has changed , but our ability to do has increased.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#4. The goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons, that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subserves;such as we see in the sexual attraction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#5. Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#7. Dreams and beasts are two keys by which we find ou the secret of our own nature. They are test objects.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#9. I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough from being that truth, which yet he quite newly and inevitably suggests to us. If I seek it in him, I shall not find it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#10. The ruin or blank, that we see when we look at nature is in our own eye ... Love is as much its demand, as perception. Indeed neither can be perfect without the other.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#12. The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#13. No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#16. Is there a difference? Yes. We are in harmony with nature, but never at peace.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#17. Understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#18. I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#19. So much of nature as he is ignorant of,so much of his own mind does not yet posess
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#20. Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations. Nature
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#21. Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#22. I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#23. Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#25. What art can paint or gild any object in after life with the glow which nature gives to the first baubles of childhood? St. Peter's cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#26. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says,
he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#27. When a man says to me, "I have the intensest love of nature," at once I know that he has none.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#28. Nature is a frugal mother, and never gives without measure. When she has work to do, she qualifies men for that and sends them equipped.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#29. To the birds and trees he talks:
Caesar of his leafy Rome,
There the poet is at home.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#30. Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty as his main end; the other Truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#31. The process has now run full circle: Preaching originates in personal counseling; preaching is personal counseling on a group basis; personal counseling originates in preaching. Personal counseling imparts to the preacher a practical familiarity with human nature which he would not otherwise obtain.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#32. The shows of the day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, andthe like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#33. Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of nature,
the sweet, without the other side,
the bitter.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#34. All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, trebleor centuple use and meaning.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#35. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#36. Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, 'Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#38. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#39. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#40. A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#41. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#42. A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#43. Nature is a tropical swamp in sunshine, on whose purlieus we hear the song of summer birds, and see prismatic dewdrops, - but her interiors are terrific, full of hydras and crocodiles.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#44. Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creepinto a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#45. Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#47. Nature, as we know her, is no saint ... She comes eating and drinking and sinning.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#48. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;-and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not be absent from the chamber which thou sittest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#49. The constructive intellect [genius] produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#50. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#51. Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and a negative pole.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#52. He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#54. The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#57. Same spirit which gave it forth, - is the fundamental law of criticism. A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#58. Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthily into nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#59. President Heber J. Grant often quoted the following statement, which is sometimes attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do-not that the nature of the thing is changed, but that our power to do is increased.'
Heber J. Grant
#60. Nature is good, but intellect is better, as the law-giver is before the law-receiver.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#62. If in the least particular, one could derange the order of nature, who would accept the gift of life?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#63. Art is the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#64. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part of God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#65. The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#67. The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it ... we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#68. The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#69. Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#70. The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He stands close to Nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes to be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#71. Solitary converse with nature; for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#72. Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the converting of the sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their design.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#73. As Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#75. The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#76. We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,
his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,
fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#77. Thy dangerous glances
make women of men;
new-born, we are melting
into nature again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#78. Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#79. It is not an arbitrary "decree of God," but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the children of men to live in to-day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#80. Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends her all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#81. Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#82. The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#83. The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospective end; and nature hides in his happiness her own ends, namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the race.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#84. The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact thatall nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#85. Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#86. In all conversation between two persons, tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#88. This knot of nature is so well tied that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#89. How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and monring dew
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#90. Emerson said, "To the dull mind, all of nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world sparkles with light." The illumined mind has shifted to the light.
Sam Beckford
#92. 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
#93. Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the character of his fellows.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#94. That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#95. To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#97. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#98. In private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its cradle. Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#99. There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#100. Natural science sharpens the discrimination. There is no false logic in nature. All its properties are permanent: the acids and metals never lie; their yea is yea, their nay, nay. They are newly discovered but not new.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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