Top 100 Emerson Ralph Waldo Quotes
#1. Measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. Warren Buffet
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#3. Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#4. 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
#6. It the proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#7. There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are
And it cometh everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#8. The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. - RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Richard Dawkins
#10. A man of good sense but of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as often as he went there, said to me; 'that he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#11. An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth,
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,
And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#12. We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, so we buy ice cream.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#14. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#18. That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these [158] have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces we are disconcerted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#19. Religionists are clinging to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law ... while the laws of the Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, the astronomy etc. are all unobserved, and sneered at when spoken of.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#21. It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#24. All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#27. For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is, for the time, the history of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#28. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,
no more. I cannot get it nearer to me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#29. 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
#30. We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#31. Freedom has nothing to do with having the right to vote for your oppressor; freedom is not having any form of oppression.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#32. The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claim to praise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#34. 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
#35. The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#36. 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
#37. What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid movement of the rail-road car!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#38. The practical common-sense of modern society, the utilitarian direction which labor, laws, opinion, religion, take, is the natural genius of the British mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#43. The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#44. What has been done in the world - the works of genius - cost nothing. There is no painful effort, but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought. Shakespeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#45. The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorageis quicksand.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#47. The clergyman who lives in the city may have piety, but he must have taste.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#48. We imperatively require a perception of and a homage to beauty in our companions. Other virtues are in request in the field and workyard, but a certain degree of taste is not to be spared in those we sit with.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#50. I believe it is the conviction of the purest men, that the net amount of man and man does not much vary. Each is incomparably superior to his companion in some faculty. His want of skill in other directions, has added to his fitness for his own work.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#55. There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#56. The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#57. Do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#59. In the country, without any interference from the law, the agricultural life favors the permanence of families.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#61. To say then, the majority are wicked, means no malice, no bad heart in the observer, but, simply that the majority are unripe, andhave not yet come to themselves, do not yet know their opinion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#62. Those who listened to Lord Chatham felt that there was something finer in the man, than anything which he said.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#64. The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#66. 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
#69. A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope of the heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#70. Think me not unkind and rude
That I walk alone in grove and glen;
I go to the god of the wood
To fetch his word to men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#71. It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#74. Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman - repose in energy. The Greek battle pieces are calm; the heroes, in whatever violent actions engaged, retain a serene aspect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#75. How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and monring dew
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#76. Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#77. The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#78. 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
#79. After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#80. God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#81. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of beat.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#82. The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#83. It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#84. It is vain to keep a secret from one who has a right to know it. It will tell itself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#86. But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#87. In our definitions, we grope after the spiritual by describing it as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is real; that law which executes itself, which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not existing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#89. Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#93. Do not spill thy soul in running hither and yon, grieving over the mistakes and the vices of others. The one person whom it is most necessary to reform is yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#94. The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#95. There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; then is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever lose the benefit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#96. Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#97. To this military attitude of the soul we give the name of Heroism ... It is a self-trust which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#98. We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you. Dante was very badcompany, and was never invited to dinner.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#100. 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
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