- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage.
There are days when the great are near us, when there is no frown on their brow, no condescension even; when they take us by the hand, and we share their thought.
It behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.
Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.
Nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere.
Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partizans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters.
Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million fresh particulars.
Wisdom is not found with those who dwell at their ease; rather nature, when she adds brain, adds difficulty.
Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part.
Teach me your mood, O patient stars. Who climb each night, the ancient sky. leaving on space no shade, no scars, no trace of age, no fear to die.
Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.
A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.
By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.
The highest praise we can attribute to any writer, painter, sculptor, builder, is, that he actually possessed the thought or feeling with which he has inspired us.
There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; alwayswe are invited to work.
Fear is cruel and mean. The political reigns of terror have been reigns of madness and malignity,--a total perversion of opinion;society is upside down, and its best men are thought too bad to live.
The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive.
Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.
He is a dull observer whose experience has not taught him the reality and force of magic, as well as of chemistry.
Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.
When you were born you were crying and everyone else was smiling. Live your life so at the end, your're the one who is smiling and everyone else is crying.
I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.
The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.
Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?
I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.
Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.
Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.
Freedom is not the right to do as you please, but the liberty to do as you should.