Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Wisdom & Knowledge (35 Quotes)

To make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom.

If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.

Go where he will, the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time.

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.

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

Knowledge exists to be imparted.

A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works, and the education of the will is the flowering and result of all this geology and astronomy.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

The soul is no traveler the wise man stays at home... Traveling is a fool's paradise.

Wisdom is to finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours.

We estimate the wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital.

Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness an open and noble temper.

The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.

Go where he will, the wise man is at home.

There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to Beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense.

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.

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant

Consideration is the soil in which wisdom may be expected to grow, and strength be given to every up-springing plant of duty.

Speak with the vulgar, think with the wise.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth it is the beginning of wisdom.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

Life is a festival only to the wise.

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

Knowledge is the only elegance.

I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college for boys, not for men and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

Shallow men believe in luck, wise and strong men in cause and effect.

Knowledge is an antidote to fear.

Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.