Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes (1444 Quotes)

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

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

We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.

The only right is what is after my constitution the only wrong is what is against it.

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people

Self sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow.

Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in, forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day, you shall begin it well and serenely. . .

Love is like a hunter, who cares not for the game when once caught, which he may have pursued with the most intense and breathless eagerness. Love is strongest in pursuit friendship in possession.

The truth, the hope of any time, must always be sought in minorities.

When God lets loose a great thinker on this planet, then all things are at risk. There is not a piece of science, but its flank my be turned to-morrow nor any literary reputation, nor the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned.

All persons are puzzles until at last we find some word or act the key to the man, to the woman straightaway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.

The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laugther.

The thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers.

Life is eating us up. We all shall be fables presently. Keep cool it will be all one a hundred years hence.

Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man. His character determines the character of the organization.

We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion-it is easy in solitude to live after your own but the great man is he who, in the midst of the world, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Why should'st thou stoop to poor excuse?

The course of everything goes to teach us faith.

A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him; wherever he goes.

When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Self-truth is the essence of heroism.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

There are two classes of poets the poets by education and practice, these we respect and poets by nature, these we love.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.

'Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

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

The only sin we never forgive each other is difference of opinion.

A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand until you come to a particular angle then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has his special Talent, and the mastery of Successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practiced.

The constructive intellect genius produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature.

There are books ... which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

The years teach us much the days never knew.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other.... Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

Go where he will, the wise man is at home.

The first thing a great person does, is make us realize the insignificance of circumstance.

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner.

A forte always makes a foible.