Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdom of Europe, were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the vaunted works of art, the master-stroke is nature's part.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let every man shovel out his own snow and the whole city will be passable.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men are what their mothers made them.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Money is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or other commodity. It is so much warmth, so much bread.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Money often costs too much.
– 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
Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature hates calculators.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
New York is a sucked orange.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our best thoughts come from others.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
People only see what they are prepared to see.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Pictures must not be too picturesque.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Reality is a sliding door.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Remarkable trait in the American Character is the union, not very infrequent, of Yankee cleverness with spiritualism.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Revolutions go not backward.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-truth is the essence of heroism.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person's genius is confined to a very few hours.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; it seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The finest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first wealth is health.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The louder he talked of his honor the faster we counted our spoons.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson