Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes (1444 Quotes)

Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration.

Knowledge is the only elegance.

No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love

When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the next man will appear.

Men are lenses through which we read our own minds.

The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.

Hospitality a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet.

Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent, but Intelligence.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.

The immortality of man is as legitimately preached from the intellections as from the moral volitions.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

The true poem is the poet's mind.

The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.

Language is the archives of history.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

Every wall is a door.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.

We may be partial, but Fate is not.

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

Earth laughs in flowers.

Life be not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

Skill to do comes of doing.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

Genius borrows nobly.

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important Benefit.

I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college for boys, not for men and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses out of sickness and pain out of wooing and worshipping out of traveling and voting and watching and caring out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

America is another name for opportunity.

I do not hesitate to read. . . all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable --any real insight or broad human sentiment.

The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes and exertions --an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own.

Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority By the minority, surely.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood....

Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind.

The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

As the gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, so should you stop off your miscellaneous activity and concentrate your force on one or a few points