Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Secrets (14 Quotes)


    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.


    Harmony of aim, not identity of conclusion, is the secret of a sympathetic life.

    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.

    Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.



    A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character.

    So ... I feel in regard to this aged England ... pressed upon by transitions of trade and ... competing populations, I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering that she has seen dark days beforeindeed, with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that, in storm of battle and calamity, she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon.

    Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.

    Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.

    He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.

    What terrible questions we are learning to ask The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

    He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.



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