Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes (1444 Quotes)


    Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, and all flock to their aid.

    Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.


    Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind that is, he seeks other men, and the otherest.

    Each man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Thenall goes well he has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun.


    Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him


    He who has acquired the ability, may wait securely the occasion of making it felt and appreciated, and know that it will not loiter.

    I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

    Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.


    No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.

    We can see well into the past we can guess shrewdly into the future but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today.

    Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply, 'Tis mans perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die.'


    We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.


    All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily punished. They are punished by fear. Whilst I stand in simple relations to my fellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him. We meet as water meets water, or as two currents of air mix, with perfect diffusion and interpenetration of nature. But as soon as there is any departure from simplicity, and attempt at halfness, or good for me that is not good for him, my neighbour feels the wrong he shrinks from me as far as I have shrunk from him his eyes no longer seek mine there is war between us there is hate in him and fear in me.


    Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong is against it.






    I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.



    Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.

    When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and rustle of the corn.

    The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

    It came into him life, it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions it went from him poetry. It was a dead fact now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in porportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it live.

    A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

    Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.



    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.

    At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles.

    For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.







    Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.



    Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

    I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome always we are invited to work only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action. An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837.


    Related Authors


    William Butler Yeats - Walt Whitman - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Homer - W. H. Auden - Ovid - Jorge Luis Borges - Geoffrey Chaucer - Dylan Thomas - Anne Sexton


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