- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

As much wisdom may be expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdom may be drawn from it.

England, an old and exhausted island, must one day be contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her children.

When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth, his eye is as clear as the heavens. When he has base ends, and speaks falsely, the eye is muddy, and sometimes asquint.

Thus grows up fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.

An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. He is strong, not to do, but to live; not in his arms, but in his heart; not as an agent, but as a fact.

Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this.

You must let go of a thing for a new one to come to you.

Astrology is astronomy brought down to Earth and applied toward the affairs of men.

The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues.

Among the map makers of each generation are the risk takers, those who see the opportunities, seize the moment and expand man's vision of the future

Money often costs too much, and power and pleasure are not cheap.

All nobility in its beginnings was somebody's natural superiority.

War disorganizes, but it is to reorganize.

It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in.

Youth is everywhere in place.

Why needs a man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses, and places of amusement? Only for want of thought.

The first questions are always to be asked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitiveness of a child.

To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of charactermakes the state unnecessary. The wise man is the State.

We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope, knowing that the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth.

Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers.

There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with the lowest, and which our ordinary education oftenlabors to silence and obstruct.

A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope of the heart.

Every word we speak is million-faced or convertible to an indefinite number of applications. If it were not so we could read no book. Your remark would only fit your case, not mine.

An answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask.

The path of things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them?

For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.

Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.

The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.

Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history isto be read and written.

The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do.

For he that feeds men serveth few; He serves all who dares be true.

A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit.

We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent wasa youthful effervescence which we have now lost.

The sentence must also contain its own apology for being spoken.

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be made public, which you have come at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity.

Best masters for the young writer and speaker are the fault- finding brothers and sisters at home who will not spare him, but willpick and cavil, and tell the odious truth.

Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know.

All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not.

Whilst the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property are very unequal. Oneman owns his clothes, and another owns a country.

Personal rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the census: property demands a government framedon the ratio of owners and of owning.

The whole constitution of property on its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons deteriorating and degrading.

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve.

We hear eagerly every thought and word quoted from an intellectual man. But in his presence our own mind is roused to activity, and we forget very fast what he says.

A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe: that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.

When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief.

The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges.

We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic.

The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and largercircles, and that without end.

The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.

Of immortality, the soul, when well employed, is incurious. It is so well, that it is sure that it will be well. It asks no questions of the Supreme Power.