- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Gold and iron are good To buy iron and gold.

Night-dreams trace on Memory's wall Shadows of the thoughts of day, And thy fortunes, as they fall, The bias of the will betray.

Fear, Craft and Avarice Cannot rear a State.

In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks Greek architecture is the perfect flowering of geometry.

Nature abhors the old.

Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.

Every man is a new method.

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men.

The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.

Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech.

For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is, for the time, the history of the world.

In every man's memory, with the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books which met his views.

Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of Nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.

Nature is the symbol of Spirit.

I always seem to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities.

Chiefly the sea-shore has been the point of departure to knowledge, as to commerce. The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.

The passages of Shakespeare that we most prize were never quoted until within this century.

Besides the general infusion of wit to heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual power is ever welcome in fine society, as the costliest addition to its rule and its credit.

A fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world.

When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity.

The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand.

There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding.

All things are known to the soul.

If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we know the particular thing, and every thing, and every man.

It never was in the power of any man or any community to call the arts into being. They come to serve his actual wants, never to please his fancy.

I have heard that stiff people lose something of their awkwardness under high ceilings, and in spacious halls. I think, sculptureand painting have an effect to teach us manners, and abolish hurry.

But in every constitution some large degree of animal vigor is necessary as material foundation for the higher qualities of the art.

But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation.

My doom and my strength is to be solitary.

Solitude is impractical, and society fatal. We must keep our head in the one and our hands in the other. The conditions are met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy.

Think me not unkind and rude That I walk alone in grove and glen; I go to the god of the wood To fetch his word to men.

We must not inquire too curiously into the absolute value of literature. Enough that it amuses and exercises us. At least it leaves us where we were. It names things, but does not add things.

Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class.

The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.

Good criticism is very rare and always precious.

Lovers should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion and meanness.

We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible.

Labor is God's education.

Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.

The people know that they need in their representative much more than talent, namely, the power to make his talent trusted.

A good deal of our politics is physiological.

A party is perpetually corrupted by personality.

Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages and liberates us.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.

Sole and self-commanded works, Fears not undermining days, Grows by decays, And, by the famous might that lurks In reaction and recoil, Makes flames to freeze, and ice to boil.

I--this thought which is called I--is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.

If, at any time, it comes into my head, that a present is due from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to give, until the opportunity is gone.

My hours are peaceful centuries.

Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, culture corrects the theory of success.

Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design;--and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients.