Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.

Men succeed when they realize that their failures are the preparation for their victories.

Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.

The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.

Fear, Craft and Avarice Cannot rear a State.

Traveling is a fool's paradise.

If a man knows the law, find out, though he live in a pine shanty, and resort to him. And if a man can pipe or sing, so as to wrap the imprisoned soul in an elysium; or can paint a landscape, and convey into souls and ochres all the enchantments of Spring or Autumn; or can liberate and intoxicate all people who hear him with delicious songs and verses; it is certain that the secret cannot be kept; the first witness tells it to a second, and men go by fives and tens and fifties to his doors.

In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.

To be a star, you must shine your own light, follow your path, and don't worry about the darkness, for that is when the stars shine brightest.
Always do what you are afraid to do.

In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.

Men of extraordinary success, in their honest moments, have always sung, "Not unto us, not unto us." According to the faith of their times, they have built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, which found in them an unobstructed channel; and the wonders of which they were the visible conductors seemed to their eye their deed.

The moral equalizes all; enriches, empowers all. It is the coin which buys all, and which all find in their pocket. Under the whipof the driver, the slave shall feel his equality with saints and heroes.

The world always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us.

man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: [152] they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when [153] the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. There

No institution will be better than the institutor.

If you have something to say, you will be given the power to say it.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun.

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

There are some men above grief and some men below it.

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

A true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of things.

Believe in yourself our strength grows out of our weakness

There is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.

The exceptional life depends not on working harder, but on different, even opposite, actions from habit and the crowd.

Never miss an opportunity of noticing anything of beauty ...

Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience.

Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay.

Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tiedoes not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where we will.

When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and rustle of the corn.

The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

One of the most beautiful compensations in life is that no person can help another without helping themselves

The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversation; and this is a main function of life.

In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim ... The details, the prose of nature, he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendour.

A farm is a good thing, when it begins and ends with itself, and does not need a salary, or a shop, to eke it out.

The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels.

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.

In our Mechanics' Fair, there must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenter's planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer instruments,
rain-gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander.

The reward of commercial civilization is the ability to consume a never-ending array of products.There are limits beyond which commodities cannot be multiplied without preventing their consumers from affirming themselves through the exercise of their personal freedom.When market dependence reaches a certain threshold it deprives people of their power to live creatively and to act autonomously. And precisely because this new impotence is so deeply experienced, it is expressed with difficulty.

Your genuine action will explain itself, and
will explain your other genuine actions.
Your conformity explains nothing.

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.

What potent blood hath modest May.

Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.

If the black man is feeble and not important to the existing races, not on a parity with the best race, the black man must serve,and be exterminated. But if the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization; for the sake of that element, no wrong nor strength nor circumstance can hurt him: he will survive and play his part. So now, the arrival in the world of such men as Toussaint, and the Haytian heroes, or of the leaders of their race in Barbadoes and Jamaica, outweighs in good omen all the English and American humanity.

The good rain, like a bad preacher, does not know when to leave off.

The world is his who has money to go over it.

It is the same among the men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can never be grasped? In persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible?

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; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.

Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthily into nature.

Nature is methodical, and doeth her work well. Time is never to be hurried.

Bring me wine, but wine which never grew
In the belly of the grape

What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries!

In certain men digestion and sex absorb the vital force, and the stronger these are, the individual is so much weaker. The more ofthese drones perish, the better for the hive.

The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy.

Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.

It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task of meeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil.

I like a man who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.

So let us then be up and doing, with a heart for any fate; still achieving, still pursuing; learn to labor and to wait.

In dreams we are true poets; we create the persons of the drama; we give them appropriate figures faces, costumes; they are perfect in their organs, attitudes, manners; moreover they speak after their own characters, not ours; and we listen with surprise to what they say.

The world laughs in flowers.

We may be partial, but Fate is not.

Conservatism is affluent and openhanded, but there is a cunning juggle in riches. I observe that they take somewhat for everythingthey give. I look bigger, but am less; I have more clothes, but am nit so warm; more armor, but less courage; more books, but less wit.

For a great nature, it is a happiness to escape a religious training; religion of character is so apt to be invaded.

Every man has a vocation. The talent is the call.

But a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech, not a man.

The Englishman who has lost his fortune is said to have died of a broken heart.

The condition of true naming, on the poet's part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and accompanying that.

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

Think me not unkind and rude
That I walk alone in grove and glen;
I go to the god of the wood
To fetch his word to men.

It is the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society. Fine society is only a self-protection against the vulgarities of the street and the tavern.

Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not "Devil's wine," but God's wine.

Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.

The farmer after sacrificing pleasure, taste, freedom, thought, love, to his work, turns out often a bankrupt, like the merchant.This result might well seem astounding. All this drudgery, from cockcrowing to starlight, for all these years, to end in mortgages and the auctioneer's flag, and removing from bad to worse. It is time to have the thing looked into, and with a sifting criticism ascertained who is the fool.

The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops – no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

There is always room for a person of force and they make room for many.

Life consists of what man is thinking about all day.

To wade in marshes and sea margins is the destiny of certain bird, and they are so accurately made for this that they are imprisoned in those places. Each animal out of its habitat would starve. To the physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk, and a dancer could not exchange functions. And thus we are victims of adaptation.

Love what is simple and beautiful.
These are the essentials.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection.

The whole value of the dime is in knowing what to do with it.

Thou art to me a delicious torment.

What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend.

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public.

The highest praise we can attribute to any writer, painter, sculptor, builder, is, that he actually possessed the thought or feeling with which he has inspired us.

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

If the colleges were better, if they ... had the power of imparting valuable thought, creative principles, truths which become powers, thoughts which become talents, - if they could cause that a mind not profound should become profound, - we should all rush to their gates: instead of contriving inducements to draw students, you would need to set police at the gates to keep order in the in-rushing multitude.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

Science, Nature,-O, I've yearned to open some page.

Women see through Claude Lorraines.

Do you think the porter and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no wonders for you? The walls of their minds are scrawled all over with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions.

Thus grows up fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

It is not the irregular hours or irregular diet that makes the romantic life.

There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.

Without the great arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him.

The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious.