Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes (1444 Quotes)




    Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.

    If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.

    We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.


    Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

    There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.

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


    If a man knows the law, find out, though he live in a pine shanty, and resort to him. And if a man can pipe or sing, so as to wrap the imprisoned soul in an elysium or can paint a landscape, and convey into souls and ochres all the enchantments of Spring or Autumn or can liberate and intoxicate all people who hear him with delicious songs and verses it is certain that the secret cannot be kept the first witness tells it to a second, and men go by fives and tens and fifties to his doors.


    There is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had.

    The wise man in the storm prays God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.

    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.


    Life is a train of moods like a string of beads and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.


    The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musican, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce.


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

    Raphael paints wisdom Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

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





    Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in your reading have been like the blast of triumph out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul.

    The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are, --Never read a book that is not a year old. Never read any but the famed books. Never read any but what you like.

    We do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchwork now a little joy, then a sorrow, now a sin, then a generous or brave action.


    An orator or author is never successful till he has learned to make his words smaller than his ideas.

    Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function

    We boast our emancipation from many superstitions but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry.

    Talent for talent's sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

    The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.



    We cannot see things that stare us in the face until the hour comes that the mind is ripened.

    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.

    It is as impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself, as for a thing to be, and not to be, at the same time.


    The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

    Imagination is not a talent of some people but is the health of everyone.


    Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, nor a mark of haste, or botching, or a second thought but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.





    There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.


    Related Authors


    William Blake - T. S. Eliot - Robert Frost - Rabindranath Tagore - Homer - John Betjeman - Euripides - Elizabeth Bishop - Anne Sexton - Allan Cunningham


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