- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.

Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?.

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

Where there is no vision a people perish.

In America and Europe, the nomadism is of trade and curiosity.

If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?

Congratulate yourself if you have done something strange, extravagant and broken the monotony.

Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.

Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.

Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.

If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.

Art is not to be found by touring to Egypt, China, or Peru; if you cannot find it at your own door, you will never find it.

Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tiedoes not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where we will.

I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.

The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.

A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.

Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs.

Civilization depends on morality.

There is no eloquence without a man behind it.

It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters, that whoever can speak can sing. So, probably, every man is eloquent once in his life. Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or

Life is comic or pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only attend towhat addresses the senses.

When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned around to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new.

Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character.

The great majority of men grow up and grow old in seeming and following.

Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

Live, let live, and help live

The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

The whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that men are convertible.

One man pins me to the wall, while with another I walk among the stars

The secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness.

Invention breeds invention.

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it.

Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying~out of gardens.

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball where everyone hides his real character, then reveals it by hiding

Is not prayer a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds: Men live on the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which yet they never enter, and with their hand on the doorlatch they die outside.

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

The landscape belongs to the person who looks at it..." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.

Enthusiasm is the height of man; it is the passing from the human to the divine.

The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.

The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.

Duty grows everywhere--like children, like grass.

When duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose.