Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Thought & Thinking (31 Quotes)


    Go, speed the stars of Thought On to their shining goals The sower scatters broad his seed, The wheat thou strew'st be souls.

    Work and thou canst escape the reward whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.

    A sect or a party is an elegant incognito, devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

    But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought from age to age.

    Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees....


    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 man cannot utter two or three sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or in that of ideas and imagination, or in the realm of intuitions and duty.

    Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library a company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years.... The thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.

    The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

    The secret of drunkeness is, that it insulates us in thought, whilst it unites us in feeling.

    Thought is the seed of action but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.

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

    The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation when memory came, it was experience when mind Acted, it was knowledge when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.

    I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way.



    Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

    Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen librarya company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age.

    Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.


    We do not yet trust the unknown powers of thought. Whence came all these tools, inventions, book laws, parties, kingdoms Out of the invisible world, through a few brains. The arts and institutions of men are created out of thought. The powers that make the capitalist are metaphysical, the force of method and force of will makes trade, and builds towns.

    To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men that is genius.


    Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

    Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, and all flock to their aid.

    It came into him life, it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions it went from him poetry. It was a dead fact now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in porportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it live.



    Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought for causes which are unpenetrated.

    The gates of thought, how slow and late they discover themselves Yet when they appear, we see that they were always there, always open.


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