Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes - Page 3

Nature is saturated with deity.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful we must carry it with us or we find it not.

Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.

Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit and not give the bread of life.

The disease with which the human mind now labors is want of faith.

Patience and fortitude conquer all things.

The peace of the man who has foresworn the use of the bullet seems to me not quite peace but a canting impotence.

I know too well how slowly we edge along sideways to every thing good & brilliant in our lives & how casually and unobservedly we make all our most valued acquaintances.

It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.

Character is what can do without success

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.

A great man stands on God. A small man stands on a great man.

I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion 20 years later.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

Fear is an instructor of great sagacity and the herald of all revolutions.

Does not… the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound?

The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

Our greatest glory consists not in never falling but in rising every time we fall.

Trust men and they will be true to you treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

A man is a method a progressive arrangement a selecting principle gathering his like unto him wherever he goes. What you are comes to you.

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.

It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this.

Beauty will not come at the call of the legislature.... It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.

The only reward of virtue is virtue.

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides.

As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain sublime assurance of success, but as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.

She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep.

A man finds room in a few square inches of his face for the traits of all his ancestors for the expression of all his history and his wants.

It is one of the beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics for then we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.

Spiritual force is stronger than material force thoughts rule the world.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.

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

You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel.

As many thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have come to me unsought.... Will these, too, seperate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be.

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

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire.

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

The only gift is a portion of thyself.

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

Self-trust is the first secret of success.

The flowering of geometry.

Life consists of what man is thinking about all day.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are ... punished by fear.

For what avail the plough or sail Or land or life if freedom fail?

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

Difficulties exist to be surmounted.

A friend may be nature's most magnificent creation.

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.