Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes (1444 Quotes)

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

Men who know the same things are not long the best company for each other

Well, said Red Jacket to someone complaining that he had not enough time, I suppose you have all there is.

'Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.

In the great books of India, an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence, which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the questions that exercise us

God enters by a private door into each individual.

What is the imagination Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy only the precursor of the reason.

It is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem.

Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen but society has chosen for us.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.

You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

To the attentive eye each moment of the year has its own beauty and in the same field it beholds every hour a picture which was never seen before and which shall never be seen again.

That which we call sin in others is experiment for us.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which must yet have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty.

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

He in whom the love of truth predominates ... submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion but he is a candidate for truth ... and respects the highest law of his being.

No sire survive, no son succeed!

Go put your creed into your deed, Nor speak with double tongue.

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

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

I know of no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as that of tenacity of purpose. . .

Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

What is a weed A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

Books are the best of things if well used if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire.

Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our own spontaneous expression with good humored inflexibility whether the whole cry of voices is on the other side.

We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves

The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.

The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones they are for what they are they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose. It is perfect in every moment of its existence.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

Sorrow makes us children again.

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.

Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

A man in debt is so far a slave.

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.

To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.

In the hands of the discoverer, medicine becomes a heroic art . . wherever life is dear he is a demigod.

Culture implies all that which gives the mind possession of its own powers as languages to the critic, telescope to the astronomer.

There is no beautifier of complexion or form of behavior like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us.

Thought is the seed of action but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

Infancy conforms to nobody all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.

Difference of opinion is the one crime which kings never forgive