- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

You do not get power so that you can go out and do things, you go out and do things and you will get the power

The universe is the externalization of the soul.

We all need someone who can help us do what we already can.

There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

The hero is he who is immovably centered.

Power obeys reality, and not appearances; power is according to quality, and not quantity.

The only sin that we never forgive in each other is a difference in opinion.

All that can be done for you is nothing to what you can do for yourself.

I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to go to church no more.

Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and a negative pole.

Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of nature,--the sweet, without the other side,--the bitter.

For nonconformity the world will whip you with its displeasure.

When all shoot at one mark, the gods join in the combat.

The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservation and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made.

Things have their laws as well as men, and things refuse to be trifled with.

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

Though we travel the world over to find beauty, we must carry it with us or we find it not . . . The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great difference in beholders.

Pride ruined the angels, Their shame them restores; And the joy that is sweetest Lurks in stings of remorse.

The secret of fortune is joy in our hands.

Let the river roll which way it will, cities will rise on its banks.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Religion is as effectively destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.

A cheerful intelligent face is the end of culture, and success enough. For it indicates the purpose of Nature and wisdom attained.

All high beauty has a moral element in it.

Whom God has put asunder, why should man put together?

Is it not better to intimate our astonishment as we pass through this world if it be only for a moment ere we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss? I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos.

Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of nature.

The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.

Genius is its own end.

The boxer's ring is the enjoyment of the part of society whose animal nature alone has been developed.

So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self.

The poisons are our principal medicines, which kill the disease and save the life.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil.

The poem is a confession of faith.

When believers and unbelievers live in the same manner - I distrust the religion.

Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not.

There is more in every person's soul than we think.

Take the place and attitude to which you see your unquestionable right, and all men acquiesce.

Skepticism is slow suicide.

The multitude of the sick shall not make us deny the existence of health.

I like people who can do things

When a man becomes cultivated, he develops a new respect for who he is. This causes him to be ashamed of his past identification of himself and others according to things, i.e. property.

You cannot make a cheap palace.

We know more from nature than we can at will communicate.

If a man sits down to think, he is immediately asked if he has a headache.

But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.

Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour.

The basis of good manners is self-reliance. Necessity is the law of all who are not self-possessed.