Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Nature (68 Quotes)

A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text.

THE POET A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray They overleapt the horizon's edge, Searched with Apollo's privilege Through man, and woman, and sea, and star, Saw the dance of nature forward far Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so.

Nature ... She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

The power which resides in man is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.

Nature hates calculators.

I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

In private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its cradle. Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness.

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

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

Nature is methodical, and doeth her work well. Time is never to be hurried.

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.

We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.

We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and so do lean and beg day and night continually.

The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature.

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly back to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind the second is the power of nature. Nature is manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought the one, the many.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely . . . but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude . . .

By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark can fly like a hawk in the air can see atoms like a gnat can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates not only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.

That which we persist in doing becomes easier not that the nature of the task has changed, but our ability to do has increased.

The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle it would whip a right it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these. It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor but they grope ever upward towards consciousness the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.

Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players. Cultivated labor drives out brute labor.

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.

To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Nature and literature are subjective phenomena every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast

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

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

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

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

Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease All others run into this one.

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature in darkness and light in heat and cold in the ebb and flow of water in male and female in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the animal body in the systole an.

Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of nature.

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep.

Nature tells every secret once.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends.

Nature hates monopolies and exceptions.

An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or it can insult like hissing or kicking or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance for joy. ... One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye it transcends speech it is the bodily symbol of identity.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

Nature encourages no looseness pardons no errors.

He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

A man is related to all nature.