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Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of drunkeness is, that it insulates us in thought, whilst it unites us in feeling.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservation and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that man are convertible.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wise man always throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wise skeptic does not teach doubt but how to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The years teach much which the days never knew.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a tendency for things to right themselves.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
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, or for worse.
– 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
There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
They can conquer who believe they can. He has not learned the first lesson in life who does not every day surmount a fear.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Think, and be careful what thou art within; For there is sin in the desire of sin; Think, and be thankful, in a different case; For there is grace in the desire of grace.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
This body, full of faults, Has yet one great quality: Whatever it encounters in this temporal life Depends upon one's actions.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good: 'Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions; the surest poison is time.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Traveling is a fool's paradise... I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there besides me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he could be, and he will become what he should be.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Washington, where an insignificant individual may trespass on a nation's time.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We acquire the strength we have overcome.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We aim above the mark to hit the mark.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are always getting ready to live but never living.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of 4 or 500 pages.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are wiser than we know.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We do what we must, and call it by the best names.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We must be our own before we can be another's.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
What you do speak so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
When the eyes say one thing and the tongue another, the practiced person relies on the language of the first.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every artist was at first an amateur.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Accept your genius and say what you think.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. -- `Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' -- Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity. A just feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady of my acquaintance said, I don't care so much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
He who has a thousand friends
Has not a friend to spare,
While he who has one enemy
Shall meet him everywhere.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man's crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never sought to ask, I never knew:
But, in my simple ignorance suppose
The selfsame power that brought me there brought you.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson
It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time…The youth gazed with great delight upon the beautiful face until he caught the maiden’s eye…The mysterious communication that is established across a house between two entire strangers, by this means moves all the springs of wonder.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium.
Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men who for truth and honor's sake
Stand fast and suffer long.
Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly...
They build a nation's pillars deep
And lift them to the sky.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty. I am over instructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance: but a countryman shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man. Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live, as well as to think.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson