- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The thing done avails, and not what is said about it.

Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.

Let none presume to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo or Socrates by village scales.

Other world? There is no other world; here or nowhere is the whole fact.

That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen.

To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul.

The word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

Each mind has its own method. A true man never acquires after college rules.

Power resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state.

Earth endures; Stars abide.

A man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies and hatreds of his competitors.

We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause.

Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthily into nature.

The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.

Sanity consists in not being subdued by your means. Fancy prices are paid for position, and for the culture of talent, but to thegrand interests, superficial success is of no account.

The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels.

Success goes thus invariably with a certain plus or positive power: an ounce of power must balance an ounce of weight.

A new degree of intellectual power seems cheap at any price.

All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey.

He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture and leave nothing but pure power.

I feel the same truth how often in my trivial conversation with my neighbours, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us.

Each man has an aptitude born with him. Do your work.

The soul refuses limits and always affirms an optimism, never a pessimism.

The universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest.

The order of things consents to virtue.

I'm happier. I guess I made up my mind to be that way.

Why should I hasten to solve every riddle which life offers me? I am well assured that the Questioner, who brings me so many problems, will bring me the answers also, in due time.

Every person has his or her own vocation-talent is the call.

Poetry being ... when we look from the center outward.

Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood.

Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,--what ample borrowers of eternity they are!

To say then, the majority are wicked, means no malice, no bad heart in the observer, but, simply that the majority are unripe, andhave not yet come to themselves, do not yet know their opinion.

The evils of popular government appear greater than they are; there is compensation for them in spirit and energy it awakens.

Delicious is a just and firm encounter of two in a thought, in a feeling.

I am the owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year, of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain, Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.

Truth has already ceased to be itself if polemically said.

Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord's power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.

A mob cannot be a permanency: everybody's interest requires that it should not exist, and only justice satisfies all.

A moment is a concentrated eternity.

What matters most is not what is behind us or before us, but what is within us.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint.

When we attempt to define and describe God, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages.

Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.

Government has been a fossil: it should be a plant.

Man is the broken giant, and in all his weakness both his body and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature.

But genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing of the common heart.

No rent-roll nor army-list can dignify skulking and dissimulation: and the first point of courtesy must always be truth, as really all the forms of good-breeding point that way.

The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own.

If you visit your friend, why need you apologize for not having visited him, and waste his time and deface your own act? Visit him now.