Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes - Page 8

When there is no vision people perish.

Good breeding a union of kindness and independence.

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best.

The First wealth is health.

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

The power which resides in man is new in nature and none but he knows what that is which he can do nor does he until he has tried.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

If you shoot at a king you must kill him.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are hunted by some fear or command behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a friend, we pause; our heat and hurry look foolish enough; now pause, now possession, is required, and the power to swell the moment from the resources of the heart. The moment is all, in all noble relations.

In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly coextensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

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

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work but the solidest things we know.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.

The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat men to whom a crises which intimidates and paralyzes the majority comes as graceful and beloved as a bride!

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

Every man has his own courage and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

Beauty without expression is boring.

Don't trust children with edge tools. Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!

When you were born you were crying and everyone else was smiling. Live your life so at the end, your're the one who is smiling and everyone else is crying.

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

the mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,—universal signs, instead of these village symbols,—and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

When a man is pushed tormented defeated he has a chance to learn something he has been put on his wits ... he has gained facts learned his ignorance is cured of the insanity of conceit has got moderation and real skill.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matter compared to what lies within us.

O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear!

The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claim to praise.

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.

At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act.

I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.

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

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.

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

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong

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.

Nature is what you may do. There is much you may not do.

No sensible person ever made an apology.

Whosoever would be a man must be a non-conformist.

How casually and unobservedly we make all our most valued acquaintances.

Skill to do comes of doing.

I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes.

A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

With the past I have nothing to do nor with the future. I live now.

Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago but it is put to better use.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby - so helpless and ridiculous.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

There is a crack in everything God has made.

A day is a miniature eternity.

Discontent is want of self-discipline it is infirmity of will.