Waldo Emerson Quotes

The philosophy of waiting is sustained by all the oracles of the universe.

A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.

We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor.

The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure.

Of all wit's uses, the main one is to live well with who has none.

It is a capital blunder; as you discover, when another man recites his charities.

If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.

A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad.

He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions.

Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy.

There is really no insurmountable barrier save your own inherent weakness of purpose.

[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.

A weed is a plant whose virtue is not yet known.

A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.

Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man.

People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

The whole value of the dime is in knowing what to do with it.

Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him!

My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.

If we live truly, we shall see truly.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

Men of God have always, from time to time, walked among men, and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.

What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, and conjures up with inarticulate speech, is to-morrow the vociferated result of public opinion, and the day after is the character of nations.

Let us advance on Chaos and the Dark

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity

No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can't dishearten it.

Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.

I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life.

Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

There is a crack in everything God has made

Honor and fortune exist for him who always recognizes the neighborhood of the great, always feels himself in the presence of high causes.

It is never too late to do right.

Nothing can be preserved that is not good.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.

Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. This limbo and dust-hole of thought is presided over by a certain reason, too.

If you cannot be free be as free as you can.

Man is the will, and woman the sentiment. In this ship of humanity, Will is the rudder, and Sentiment the sail; when woman affects to steer, the rudder is only a masked sail.

We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history.

The simplest words,--we do not know what they mean except when we love and aspire.

When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.