- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Never read any book that is not a year old.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth whispers, 'I can.

Far off, men swell, bully, and threaten; bring them hand to hand, and they are feeble folk.

The human body is a magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint is taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; - read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

Every advantage has its tax.

Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?

Genius seems to consist merely in trueness of sight, in using such words as show that the man was an eye-witness, and not a repeater of what was told.

Good nature is stronger than tomahawks.

The hero is suffered to be himself.

The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.

If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument

You see, it's all clear, we were meant to be here from the beginning.

The wise skeptic does not teach doubt but how] to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting.

We flee away from cities, but we bring The best of cities, these learned classifiers, Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts.

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.

Each mind has its own method.

The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.

We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated.

Find the journey's end in every step.

The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Strong men greet war, tempest, hard times. They wish, as Pindar said, to tread the floors of hell, with necessities as hard as iron.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.

A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune.

The laws of light and of heat translate each other;-so do the laws of sound and colour; and so galvanism, electricity and magnetism are varied forms of this selfsame energy.

Coal is a portable climate.

Civilization depends on morality.

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

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

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

Where there is no vision a people perish.

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

Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it.

The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.

Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy.

The masses have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

We walk alone in the world.

All the great ages have been ages of belief.

Perhaps love is only the highest symbol of friendship, as all other things seem symbols of love.