Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Mind (67 Quotes)

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching.

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.

The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions.

The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.

Thoughts are the seed of action.

Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best of minds. Men live on the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Culture implies all that which gives the mind possession of its own powers as languages to the critic, telescope to the astronomer.

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.

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.

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.

Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

A man's style is his mind's voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices.

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.

The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.

Can we never extract the tapeworm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen.

Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.

Thought is the property of those only who can entertain it.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

Cards were at first for benefits designed, sent to amuse, not to enslave the mind.

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.

Great men are they who see that ... thoughts rule the world.

For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible

Nature never wears a mean appearance. When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense of mind.

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.

Thought is the blossom language the bud action the fruit behind.

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.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind.

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

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

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.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind that is, he seeks other men, and the otherest.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

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.

Thought makes every thing fit for use.