- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The finest poetry was first experience.

Wherever there is power there is age.

Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize or accept another's dogmatism.

If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment, I could never stay there five minutes.

There are men who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations with them, and lead the activity of the human race.

He, who loves the bristle of bayonets, only sees in their glitter what beforehand he feels in his hand.

We are the prisoners of ideas.

New arts destroy the old.

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

The city is recruited from the country.

Harmony of aim, not identity of conclusion, is the secret of sympathetic life.

The most Indian thing about the Indian is surely not his moccasins or his calumet, his wampum or his stone hatched, but traits of character and sagacity, skill, or passion.

Necessity does everything well.

Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times.

The field cannot be seen from within the field.

Nothing is quite beautiful alone; nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace.

Go put your creed into your deed, Nor speak with double tongue.

The difference between Talent and Genius is that Talent says things which he has never heard but once, and Genius things which he has never heard.

There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.

No one suspects the days to be gods.

He who loves goodness harbors angels, reveres reverence, and lives with God.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

The French woman says, 'I am a woman and a Parisienne, and nothing foreign to me appears altogether human.'

When half-gods go The gods arrive.

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects.

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

Out from the heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old.

Life only avails, not the having lived.

Washington, where an insignificant individual may trespass on a nation's time.

Most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means.

The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

A home kept to the end of display is impossible to all but a few women, and their success is dearly bought.

Immitation is suicide.

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and not for life.

Every opinion reacts on him who utters it.

The constructive intellect [genius] produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature.

The effect of the indulgence of human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration.

Action is the process whereby what is not fully formed passes into expressive consciousness.

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

We are immensed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.

Does not… the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound?

Only so much of life do I know as I have lived.

I know too well how slowly we edge along sideways to every thing good & brilliant in our lives & how casually and unobservedly we make all our most valued acquaintances.

Love what is simple and beautiful. These are the essentials.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must, ' The youth whispers, 'I can.