Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes (1444 Quotes)


    Money is of no value it cannot spend itself. All depends on the skill of the spender.


    There is no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn't matter who gets the credit.

    In the woods we return to reason and faith. Standing on the bare ground my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space all mean egotism vanishes.... The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.

    The best bribe which London offers today to the imagination, is, that, in such a vast variety of people and conditions, one can believe there is room for persons of romantic character to exist . . .



    Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances, the senses are despotic

    If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries.


    People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.


    The world is upheld by the veracity of good men they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.

    For each thorn, there's a rosebud... for each twilight a dawn... for each trial the strength to carry on, For each stormcloud a rainbow... for each shadow the sun... for each parting sweet memories when sorrow is done.


    There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

    Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go.




    From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all

    We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and so do lean and beg day and night continually.

    We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.

    The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.



    I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

    The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature.


    One of our statesmen said, 'The curse of this country is eloquent men.'

    The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. . . . He is the world's eye.

    You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

    Nothing is more simple than greatness indeed, to be simple is to be great.

    Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

    If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly back to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind the second is the power of nature. Nature is manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought the one, the many.

    Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best of minds. Men live on the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside.

    A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely . . . but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude . . .

    One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.


    We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace that it will abolish slavery.

    Here is a day now before me A day is a fortune and an estate who loses a day loses life.

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






    Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.

    He who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the plants, the waters, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments is the rich and royal man.


    A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune.


    Related Authors


    Ralph Waldo Emerson - Khalil Gibran - Dante Alighieri - Alexander Pope - Thomas Moore - Sylvia Plath - Octavio Paz - Louis Aragon - Edgar Guest - Anne Sexton


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