Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes (1444 Quotes)

What a new face courage puts on everything.

Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on someone without getting some on yourself.

To-morrow, when the masks shall fall
That dizen nature's carnival,
The pure shall see, by their own will,
Which overflowing love shall fill,-
'Tis not within the force of Fate
The fate-conjoined to separate.

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.

Rhodora If the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.

The world is his who has money to go over it.

The greatest delight the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me and I to them.

A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.

In creeds never was such levity witness the heathenism in Christianity, the periodic revivals, the Millennium mathematics, the peacock ritualism, the retrogression to Popery, the maundering of Mormons, the squalor of Mesmerism, the deliration of

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you.

The Yankee is one who, if he once gets his teeth set on a thing, all creation can't make him let go

A man cannot utter 2 or 3 sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought . . .

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.

There is nothing so dreadful as a great victory - except a great defeat.

There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.

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

The education of the will is the object of our existence.

Culture is one thing and varnish is another.

The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe the key to all ages is Imbecility imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments victims of gravity,

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

The whole of what we know is a system of compensations. Each suffering is rewarded each sacrifice is made up every debt is paid.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Our strength grows out of our weakness.

A good intention clothes itself with power.

Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled.

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.

The finished man of the world must eat every apple once.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

Genius has no taste for weaving sand.

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

That which we call character is a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a familiar or genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart.

Life is a festival only to the wise.

To live without duties is obscene.

Only that mind draws me which I cannot read.

The things taught in colleges and school are not an education but a means to an education.

Is it so bad to be misunderstood Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.

There is always safety in valor.

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him with his friendship.

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

Life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour.