- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.
Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows.
There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes.
Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.
If you love and serve man, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape remuneration.
Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.
It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.
"In the woods we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life~~no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair."
The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other.
He in whom the love of truth predominates . . . submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion; but he is a candidate for truth . . . and respects the highest law of his being.
It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all.
In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep.
All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power.
The cure for false theology is motherwit. Forget your books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour.
My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock should find the time in my face.
All great natures delight in stability; all great men find eternity affirmed in the very promise of their faculties.
Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.
The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible.
If a man carefully examine his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead. Such a creature is probably immortal.
I please myself with the graces of the winter scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the genial influences of summer.
God had infinite time to give us.... He cut it up into a near succession of new mornings, and, with each, therefore, a new idea, new inventions, and new applications.
A strenuous soul hates cheap success. It is the ardor of the assailant that makes the vigor of the defendant.
Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul.
Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.
The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.
Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of beat.
There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name.
I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity.
We aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it.
Unhappily, no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.
Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first.
Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen but society has chosen for us.
