Waldo Quotes

But in every constitution some large degree of animal vigor is necessary as material foundation for the higher qualities of the art. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A friend may be nature's most magnificent creation. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When the night is darkest, the stars come out. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The best bribe which London offers to-day 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, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope to confront their counterparts. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to hermother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

An individual has a healthy personality to the exact degree to which they have the propensity to look for the good in every situation. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson ~ Catherine E. McLean

Man was born to be rich, or to inevitably grow rich, by the use of his faculties: by the union of thought with nature. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not news nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat, and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, bur raise it to that standard. That great, defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

God offers to every mind a choice between repose and truth. take which you please
you can never have both. [Essay on Intellect] ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom
in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unraveled, nor shown. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every man has a choice between love of truth and love of repose. Love of repose brings him a solid reputation and peaceful life; love of truth keeps him in suspense. A man who loves truth respects the highest law of his being. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him; he has become tediously good insome particular but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only thing that can grow is the thing you give energy to. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is elimination of the unnecessary. ~ Waldo Salt

The Americans have no faith, they rely on the power of a dollar; they are deaf to sentiment. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

So ... I feel in regard to this aged England ... pressed upon by transitions of trade and ... competing populations,-I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering that she has seen dark days before;-indeed, with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that, in storm of battle and calamity, she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The virtue you would like to have, assume it is already yours, appropriate it, enter into the part and live the character just as the great actor is absorbed in ... the part he plays. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Behind every individual closes organization; before him opens liberty,
the Better, the Best. The first and worse races are dead.The second and imperfect races are dying out, or remain for the maturing of the higher. In the latest race, in man, every generosity, every new perception, the love and praise he extorts from his fellows, are certificates of advance out of fate into freedom. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

To be at one with God is to be at peace. The child simplicity is the greatest agency in bringing this full and complete realization, the child simplicity that recognizes its true relations with the Father's life. There are people I know who have come into such a conscious realization of their oneness with this Infinite Life, this Spirit of Infinite Peace, that their lives are fairly bubbling over with joy. ~ Ralph Waldo Trine

A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Talent finds its models, methods, and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

We acquire the strength we have overcome. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The bulk of mankind believe in two gods. They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion; but in mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come under another. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The universal does not attract us until housed in an individual. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and monring dew ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In old persons, when thus fully expressed, we often observe a fair, plump, perennial waxen complexion, which indicates that all the ferment of earlier days has subsided into serenity of thought and behavior. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our people are slow to learn the wisdom of sending character instead of talent to Congress. Again and again they have sent a man of great acuteness, a fine scholar, a fine forensic orator, and some master of the brawls has crunched him up in his hands like a bit of paper. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate;
debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be forgone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I'm not afraid of falling into my inkpot. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pay no heed to the average photographer's remarks upon "flat" and "weak" negatives. Probably he is flat, weak, stale, and unprofitable; your negative may be first-rate, and probably is if he does not approve of it. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pure by impure is not seen. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything in nature goes by law, and not by luck. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is with a good book as it is with good company. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

I have been told, that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personalrelations. But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The forest is my loyal friend
A Delphic shrine to me. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

My angel,-his name is Freedom,-
Choose him to be your king;
He shall cut pathways east and west,
And fend you with his wing. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hang it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is said, no man can write but one book; and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its impression on all his performances. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man? ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A good intention but fixed and resolute - bent on high and holy ends, we shall find means to them on every side and at every moment; and even obstacles and opposition will but make us "like the fabled specter-ships," which sail the fastest in the very teeth of the wind. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poeticyouth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think the vice of our housekeeping is that it does not hold man sacred. The vice of government, the vice of education, the viceof religion, is one with that of the private life. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The multitude of false churches accredits the true religion. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest difficulty is that men do not think enough of themselves, do not consider what it is that they are sacrificing when they follow in a herd, or when they cater for their establishment. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men of character are the conscience of the society to which they belong. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is methodical, and doeth her work well. Time is never to be hurried. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

'Well,' said Red Jacket [to someone complaining that he had not enough time], 'I suppose you have all there is.' ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

No mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it
else it is none. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; ... he learns his ignorance, is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The hero is not fed on sweets, Daily his own heart he eats; Chambers of the great are jails, And head-winds right for royal sails. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the one, and the two. - 1. Unity, or Identity; and, 2. Variety. We unite all things by perceiving the law which pervades them; by perceiving the superficial differences and the profound resemblances. But every mental act, - this very perception of identity or oneness, recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak or to think without embracing both. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Say thank you! I want to hear you say it now. Out loud. 'Thank you.' You're saying thank you because your faith is so strong that you don't doubt that whatever the problem, you'll get through it. You're saying thank you because you know that even in the eye of the storm, God has put a rainbow in the clouds. You're saying thank you because you know there's no problem created that can compare to the Creator of all things. Say thank you! ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

I
this thought which is called I
is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the ignorant person who seeks his or her own ends at the expense of the greater whole. It is the ignorant person, therefore, who is the selfish person. The truly wise person is never selfish. ~ Ralph Waldo Trine

A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is a search after power; and this is an element with which the world is so saturated,-there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged,-that no honest seeking goes unrewarded. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest delight the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me and I to them. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man should not be a silkworm; nor a nation a tent of caterpillars. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The philanthropists inquire whether Transcendentalism does not mean sloth: they had as lief hear that their friend is dead, as that he is a Transcendentalist; for then is he paralyzed, and can never do anything for humanity. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The hero sees that the event is ancillary: it must follow him. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A beautiful soul always dwells in a beautiful world. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is in nature a parallel unity which corresponds to the unity in the mind and makes it available. This methodizing mind meets no resistance in its attempts. The scattered blocks, with which it strives to form a symmetrical structure, fit. This design following after finds with joy that like design went before. Not only man puts things in a row, but things belong in a row. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson