Waldo Emerson Quotes

Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.

The virtue of books is to be readable.

The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral sentiment.

Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet

Surely nobody would be a charlatan, who could afford to be sincere.

We all wish to be of importance in one way or another. The child coughs with might and main, since it has no other claim on the company.

A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.

They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear.

Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.

My joy in friends, those sacred people, is my consolation.

He that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves

War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man.

The masses have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

Faith makes us, and not we it; and faith makes its own forms.

The Americans have no faith, they rely on the power of a dollar; they are deaf to sentiment.

We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated.

Where there is no vision a people perish.

I have heard that death takes us away from ill things, not from good. I have heard that when we pronounce the name of man we pronounce the belief of immortality.

Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere as to expect poetry from this engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber.

Spoons and skimmers you can be undistinguishably together; but vases and statues require each a pedestal for itself.

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

Vivacity, leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed to be nice in choosing. We must fetch the pump with dirty water, if clean cannot be had.

Continual failure is a road to success - if you have the strength to go on.

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.

We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim.

I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

Is not prayer a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

Practice radical humility." He (or she)who masters the art of humility cannot be humiliated.

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

Travel is a fools paradise.

There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.

Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it.

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

The landscape belongs to the person who looks at it..." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Live, let live, and help live

Every man contemplates an angel in his future self.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby - so helpless and so ridiculous.

All the great ages have been ages of belief.

Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.

You see, it's all clear, we were meant to be here from the beginning.

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose.

When the man is at home, his standing in society is well known and quietly taken; but when he is abroad, it is problematical, and is dependent on the success of his manners.

For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus.

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; - read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument