- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The soul lets no man go without some visitations and holy-days of a diviner presence.
There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.
If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice.
In all conversation between two persons, tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God.
The civility of the world has reached that pitch that their more moral genius is becoming indispensable, and the quality of this race is to be honored for itself.
The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorageis quicksand.
Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.
Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate. The right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature.
The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we callFate.
Our condition as men is risky and ticklish enough. One can not be sure of himself and his fortune an hour, but he may be whisked off into some pitiable or ridiculous plight.
Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody.
Every young man is prone to be misled by the suggestions of his own ill-founded ambition which he mistakes for the promptings of asecret genius, and thence dreams of unrivaled greatness.
You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of histuition comes, on his way to school, from the shop- windows.
If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to conceal, his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into that as into any which he publishes.
We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young anddodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd.
No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share.
Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.
I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.
The longer we live the more we must endure the elementary existence of men and women; and every brave heart must treat society asa child, and never allow it to dictate.
The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be low, as that we should be low; for we musthave a society.
The world of men show like a comedy without laughter: populations, interests, government, history; 't is all toy figures in a toyhouse.
Man moves in all modes, by legs of horses, by wings of winds, by steam, by gas of balloon, by electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to hunt the eagle in his own element.
Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use the tools, they use you. All tools are in one sense edge-tools, and dangerous.
The affirmative class monopolize the homage of mankind. They originate and execute all the great feats. What a force was coiled upin the skull of Napoleon!
Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.
I find it more credible, since it is anterior information, that one man should know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many men should know the world.
A right rule for a club would be,-Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic.
The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion.
I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.
I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.
Two sorts of writers possess genius: those who think, and those who cause others to think.
All natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.
Go cherish your soul; express companions; set your habits to a life of solitude; then will the faculties rise fair and full within.
The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough, and the furrow, are of one stuff; and the stuff is such, and so much, that the variations of form are unimportant.
Don't ever give up on something or someone that you can't go a full day without thinking about.
If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.
It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.
The babe in arms is a channel through which the energies we call fate, love, and reason visibly stream.