- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds.
We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men aboutus are dupes. But life is a sincerity.
Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride.
But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?
Romeo, of dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more,than Juliet,--than Romeo.
The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees.
Logic is the procession or proportionate unfolding of the intuition; but its virtue is as silent method; the moment it would appear as propositions, and have a separate value, it is worthless.
Ten percent of people can think, another ten percent of people think that they think, and eighty percent of people would rather die than be made to think.
The test of civilization is the power of drawing the most benefit out of cities.
You've got to be taught to be afraid Of people whose eyes are oddly made And people whose skin is a different shade.
To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone.
But we need not fear that we can lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end.
Numbers serve to discipline rhetoric. Without them it is too easy to follow flights of fancy, to ignore the world as it is and to remold it nearer the heart's desire.
Every mind is different; and the more it is unfolded, the more pronounced is that difference.
The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. ... In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.
A sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal powers, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us, and which we can love.
Each philosopher, each bard, each actor has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself.
The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.
But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.
Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.
The wise man, the true friend, the finished character, we seek everywhere, and only find in fragments.
All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.
The most active lives have so much routine as to preclude progress almost equally with the most inactive.
Women see better than men. Men see lazily, if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act.
It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy.
We resent all criticism which denies us anything that lies in our line of advance.
War, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels.