Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Power (25 Quotes)

Courage consists in the power of self-recovery.

The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.... Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which flows into you as life, place yourself in the full center of that flood, then you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment.

Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of you first.

The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it. . . . Beware of me, it says, but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands.

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.

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

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

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

Power and speed be hands and feet.

Thought...quickly tends to convert itself into a power, And organizes a huge instrumentality of means.

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

The task ahead of us is never as great as the power behind us.

Life is a search after power.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God you shall not have both.

All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power.

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

A good intention clothes itself with power.

Valor consists in the power of self recovery.

The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes and exertions --an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

Be not the slave of your own past ... plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience, that shall explain and overlook the old.

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

A vivid thought brings the power to paint it and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection.