Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes (1444 Quotes)

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

There is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated . . .

A field cannot well be seen from within the field.

A man is related to all nature.

New York is a sucked orange.

The only reward of virtue is virtue the only way to have a friend is to be one.

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

All necessary truth is its own evidence.

Don't waste yourself in rejection, or bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

Finish every 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 begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue.

Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

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

Insist upon yourself. Be original.

That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say even though we may repeat the words ever so often.

For me, commerce is of trivial import love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion.

What your heart thinks great is great. The souls emphasis is always right.

There can be no high civility without a deep morality

The gentleman is a man of truth.

Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

If a man can... make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

There is always room for a person of force and they make room for many.

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you pleaseyou can never have both.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

We are students of words we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

Every Stoic was a Stoic but in Christendom where is the Christian.

Universities are, of course, hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

Valor consists in the power of self recovery.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

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.

The louder he talked of his honor the faster we counted our spoons.

The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock plumes, and embroidery and I remember one rainy morning in the city of Palermo, the street was ablaze with scarlet umbrellas

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

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

Self command is the main discipline.

Dear to us are those who love us. . . but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit . . .

The most dangerous thing is illusion.

People are to be taken in very small doses.