- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.

It is only as a man puts off from himself all external support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail.

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional.

The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.

Human beings cannot endure the geological chaos they encounter under the soil of their own gardens.

Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.

Others can get in your way temporarily, but only you can get out of your way permanently. Our best thoughts come from others.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.

Revolutions go not backward.

Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.

I am sure of this, that by going much alone a man will get more of a noble courage in thought and word than from all the wisdom that is in books.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.

When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.

I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Palestine, Italy, Spain, and the Islands, - the Genius and creative Principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind.

All history is biography.

Build therefore your own world.

Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest

All substances the cunning chemist Time Melts down into that liquor of my life.

Let us leave hurry to slaves.

Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.

Luck is just another word for tenacity of purpose.

Our chief want in life, is, someone who shall make us do what we can. This is the service of a friend. With him we are easily great.

It is one of the biggest blessing that you can be stupid with your true friends and behave like you shame to do elsewhere

Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfillments; each of its joys ripens into a new want.

Government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world shall last his days.

It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.

Let us answer a book of ink with a book of flesh and blood.

Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can walk but after the counsel of his own bosom.

O friend, never strike sail to a fear!

The unbelief of the age is attested by the loud condemnation of trifles.

Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly make their executive officers out of saints.

Culture opens the sense of beauty.

Let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.

A man is not to aim at innocence, any more than he is to aim at hair, but he is to keep it.

In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.

A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature.

The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of life.

A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill.

The dead sleep in their moonless night; my business is with the living.

Manners make the fortune of the ambitious youth.

There is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual.

Every man has a vocation. The talent is the call.

The populace drags down the gods to their own level.

A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works.

A scholar is a man with his inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know.