Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes (1444 Quotes)

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

The pest of society are the egotist, they are dull and bright, sacred and profane, course and fine. It is a disease that like the flu falls on all constitutions.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.

It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.

The craft of the merchant is this bringing a thing where it abounds to where it is costly.

The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power.

The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires

The passive master lent his hand, To the vast Soul which o'er him planned.

The universal does not attract us until housed in an individual

He that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves

I awoke with devout thanksgiving for my friends.

All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

All promise outruns performance.

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.

The chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do the best we can.

There comes a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide, that he must take himself for better, or for worse as his portion.

What school, college, or lecture bring men depends on what men bring to carry it home in.

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 book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius.... They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead man hopes genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame.

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

All diseases run into one, old age.

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it.

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics.

There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Platonever enough to pay for an edition of his works yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them written in his hand.

The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the peo

How painful to give a gift to any person of sensibility, or of equality It is next worst to receiving one

I didn't find my friends the good Lord gave them to me.

A person seldom falls sick, but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die.

The greatest meliorator of the world is selfish, huckstering Trade.

We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves....

Vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly ads to our power and enlarges our field of action.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

We do what we can, and then make up a theory to prove our performance the best.

Fair the soul's recess and shrine,
Magic-built, to last a season,
Masterpiece of love benign!

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not seen if the eye is too near.

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.

Religion is as effectually destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.

Never read a book that is not a year old.

The religions are obsolete when the reforms do not proceed from them.

Imitation is suicide.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist