Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quotes

• “The law of the table is beauty, a respect to the common soul of the guests. Everything is unreasonable which is private ...”
• “Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out...”
• “Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous o...”
• “To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciatio...”
• “Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He th...”
• “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The ...”
• “If the colleges were better, if they ... had the power of imparting valuable thought, creative principles, truths which ...”
• “Society undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific...”
• “The two parties which divide the State, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation are very old, and have disputed...”
• “The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the w...”
• “Attributed to Emerson in The Gift of Depression: Twenty-one Inspirational Stories Sharing Experience, Strength, and Hope...”
• “Nature is no sentimentalist, - does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not...”
• “Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as ...”
• “We must have kings, and we must have nobles. Nature provides such in every society, - only let us have the real instead ...”
• “When Confucius and the Indian Scriptures were made known, no claim to monopoly of ethical wisdom could be thought of... ...”
• “In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us...”
• “What, then, is his secret? Is it not that he out-Yankees us all? that his range includes us all? that he is equally at h...”
• “We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms o...”
• “Gow, Foundations for Human Engineering (1931) contains the following passage: "I have the backing of Emerson, for it was...”
• “Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our w...”
• “Modern technics, even apart from the special arts that it fostered, had a cultural contribution to make in its own right...”
• “I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing sm...”
• “There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; eac...”
• “It was a maxim with him that power is not so much shown in talent or in successful performance as in tone; the absolute ...”
• “Virtually at the same time as Kierkegaard gave philosophical significance to moods, Emerson was doing the same. In "Expe...”
• “Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influen...”
• “For nature beats in perfect tune, And rounds with rhyme her every rune, Whether she work in land or sea, Or hide undergr...”
• “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generat...”
• “I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can...”
• “England's genius filled all measure Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure, Gave to the mind its emperor, And life ...”
• “Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism va...”
• “I like a church, I like a cowl, I love a prophet of the soul, And on my heart monastic aisles Fall like sweet strains or...”
• “The Preacher", in The Index: A Weekly Paper (Feb. 5, 1880) pp. 62-3. Originally written as a parlor-lecture to some Divi...”
• “If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting...”
• “This sentence has no known source in Emerson's works, but its general sense does closely match the tenor of Emerson's es...”
• “In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up i...”
• “His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand to embody any capricious thought that is uppermost...”
• “There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future: the Establishment and the Movement. At ...”
• “And when his hours are numbered, and the world Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, Leaves, when the sun appears, a...”
• “The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and protection from those perverse ...”
• “In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In t...”
• “[A] great original thinker, who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. ... People that had ligh...”
• “The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it h...”
• “Said to a young Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had written a piece critical of Plato in response to his earlier convers...”
• “We, as we read," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in an essay on history, "must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, ...”
• “There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men's words I remember so well that I must ofte...”
• “Every really able man, in whatever direction he work,-a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poe...”
• “The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If y...”
• “He began where many poets end, seeking at once the upper air, the region of pure thought and ideality. ... Emerson was t...”
• “Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting-a wayside sacrament. Wel...”