Ralph Waldo Emerson

From BillionQuotes

Jump to: navigation, search
Image:RWEmerson.jpg
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American author, poet, and essayist

Ralph Waldo Emerson (25 May 1803 - 27 April 1882) was an American philosopher, essayist, and poet.

Contents

[edit]

Sourced

  • He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
  • Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment.
  • I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders.
    • Letter to Carlyle (October 30, 1841)
  • Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.
  • Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.
    • Walter Savage Landor, from The Dial, XII
  • There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.
  • I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "LEAVES OF GRASS." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.
    I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.
    I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging…
  • Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchent brig.
  • Nothing can be preserved that is not good.
    • In Praise of Books (1860)
  • Never read any book that is not a year old.
    • In Praise of Books
  • The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself...The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.
  • A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.
    • Power and Laws of Thought (c. 1870)
  • Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.
    • Parnassus, Preface (1874)
  • There are two classes of poets—the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.
    • Parnassus, Preface
  • What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered.
    • Fortune of the Republic (1878)
  • The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.
    • The Natural History of Intellect (1893)
  • All the thoughts of a turtle are turtles, and of rabbits, rabbits.
    • The Natural History of Intellect
[edit]

Journals (1822-1855)

  • To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
    • December 20, 1822
  • When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.
  • Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see—not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.
    • April 11, 1834
  • Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
    • 1836
  • I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.
    • June 27, 1839
  • The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.
    • 1839
  • You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.
    • October 1842
  • The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
    • May 25, 1843
  • Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.
    • March 1845
  • Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.
    • May 1849
    • This is a remark Emerson wrote referring to the unreliability of second hand testimony and worse upon the subject of immortality. It is often taken out of proper context, and has even begun appearing on the internet as "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know" or sometimes just "I hate quotations." (More quotations on: Quotations)
  • Blessed are those who have no talent!
    • February 1850
  • The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.
    • February 12, 1851
  • 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 make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.
    • February 1855
  • The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.
    • July 1855
[edit]

Nature (1836)

  • Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generation beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
    • Introduction
  • Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.
    • Introduction
  • 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!
    • Ch. 1, Nature
  • There are always two parties, the party of the past and the party of the Future; the Establishment and the Movement...
    • Ch. 1, Nature
  • Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection.
    • Ch. 1, Nature
  • The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of a child.
    • Ch. 1, Nature
  • Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
    • Ch. 1, Nature
  • Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.
    • Ch. 3, Beauty
  • Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
    • Ch. 4, Language
  • We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox.
    • Ch. 8, Prospects
  • A man is a god in ruins.
    • Ch. 8, Prospects
[edit]

The American Scholar (1837)

  • Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated.
  • Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table.
  • The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.
  • What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; — show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the leger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; — and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.
  • Do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
[edit]

Essays: First Series (1841)

  • And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.
    • Love
  • Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.
    • Heroism
[edit]

History

  • These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use in broad day. The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to those who do not respect themselves. I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.
  • Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.
  • History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, — see how it could and must be.
  • There is properly no history; only biography.
  • Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same.
  • Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows how to play with them as a young child plays with graybeards and in churches.
  • It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
  • There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.
  • All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself.
  • The difference between men is in their principle of association. Some men classify objects by color and size and other accidents of appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and effect. The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance. Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.
  • When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions. Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God have, from time to time, walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.
  • Broader and deeper we must write our annals, from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience, if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.
[edit]

Self-Reliance

  • I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. 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. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.
  • A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre 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: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
  • 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.
  • We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.
  • 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 for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but though his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
  • Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so.
  • Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
  • Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
  • Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
  • No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.
  • The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.
  • An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
  • I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
  • Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.
  • Traveling is a fool's paradise...My giant goes with me wherever I go.
  • For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?
  • Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
[edit]

Compensation

  • Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good.
  • For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something.
  • Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff.
  • Men suffer all their life long, under the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But it is as impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be at the same time.
[edit]

Friendship

  • Thou art to me a delicious torment.
  • Almost all people descend to meet.
  • Happy is the house that shelters a friend!
  • A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.
  • A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
  • Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.
  • The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.
  • I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.
[edit]

Prudence

  • In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.
  • Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.
  • Tomorrow will be like today. Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.
  • Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.
[edit]

Circles

  • Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
  • One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly.
  • Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one.
  • Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
[edit]

Art

  • Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
  • Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of art of human character, — a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes.
  • Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.
[edit]

Essays: Second Series (1844)

  • Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
    • Experience
  • Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life?
    • Experience
  • The only gift is a portion of thyself.
    • Gifts
[edit]

The Poet

  • The less government we have, the better - the fewer laws, and the less confided power.
  • For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.
  • We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
  • Language is the archives of history...Language is fossil poetry.
[edit]

Politics

  • Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word Politic, which now for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?
  • Hence, the less government we have, the better, — the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual. (This quote greatly reflects his views on individualism and the fact that it is up to the individual to do good rather than each individual working together as a commuted whole).
  • We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy.
[edit]

Nominalist and Realist

  • 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.
  • Every man is wanted and no man is wanted much.
  • The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
[edit]

Poems (1847)

  • Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home:
    Thou art not my friend, and I’m not thine.
  • For what are they all, in their high conceit,
    When man in the bush with God may meet?
    • Good-bye, st. 4
  • Nor knowest thou what argument
    Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent:
    All are needed by each one,
    Nothing is fair or good alone.
  • I wiped away the weeds and foam,
    And fetched my sea-born treasures home;
    But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
    Had left their beauty on the shore
    With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.
    • Each and All, st. 3
  • 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 pensive smiles;
    Yet not for all his faith can see,
    Would I that cowled churchman be.
    Why should the vest on him allure,
    Which I could not on me endure?
  • The hand that rounded Peter's dome,
    And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
    Wrought in a sad sincerity,
    Himself from God he could not free;
    He builded better than he knew,
    The conscious stone to beauty grew.
    • The Problem, st. 2
  • Earth proudly wears the Parthenon
    As the best gem upon her zone.
    • The Problem, st. 3
  • Announced by all the trumpets of the sky
    Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
    Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
    Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven,
    And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.
  • And when his hours are numbered, and the world
    Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
    Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
    To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone
    Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
    The frolic architecture of the snow.
    • The Snow-Storm
  • Life is too short to waste
    The critic bite or cynic bark,
    Quarrel, or reprimand;
    'Twill soon be dark;
    Up! mind thine own aim, and
    God speed the mark!
  • For there's no rood has not a star above it;
    The cordial quality of pear or plum
    Ascends as gladly in a single tree,
    As in broad orchards resonant with bees;
    And every atom poises for itself,
    And for the whole.
  • But all sorts of things and weather
    Must be taken in together
    To make up a year,
    And a sphere.
  • Talents differ; all is well and wisely put;
    If I cannot carry forests on my back,
    Neither can you crack a nut.
    • Fable
  • Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
    This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
    Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
    Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.
  • Whoso walketh in solitude,
    And inhabiteth the wood,
    Choosing light, wave, rock, and bird,
    Before the money-loving herd,
    Into that forester shall pass
    From these companions power and grace.
  • For nature beats in perfect tune,
    And rounds with rhyme her every rune,
    Whether she work in land or sea,
    Or hide underground her alchemy.
    Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
    Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
    But it carves the bow of beauty there,
    And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.
    • Woonotes II, st. 7
  • Olympian bards who sung
    Divine Ideas below,
    Which always find us young,
    And always keep us so.
  • Give all to love;
    Obey thy heart;
    Friends, kindred, days,
    Estate, good fame,
    Plans, credit, and the muse;
    Nothing refuse.
  • Though thou loved her as thyself,
    As a self of purer clay,
    Tho' her parting dims the day,
    Stealing grace from all alive,
    Heartily know,
    When half-gods go,
    The gods arrive.
    • Give All to Love, st. 4
  • But these young scholars who invade our hills,
    Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
    And travelling often in the cut he makes,
    Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
    And all their botany is Latin names.
  • 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.
  • Hast thou named all the birds without a gun;
    Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk.
  • Pass in, pass in, the angels say,
    In to the upper doors;
    Nor count compartments of the floors,
    But mount to Paradise
    By the stairway of surprise.
[edit]

Representative Men (1850)

  • He is great who is what he is from Nature, and who never reminds us of others.
    • Uses of Great Men
  • When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field the next man will appear.
    • Uses of Great Men
  • Every hero becoems a bore at last.
    • Uses of Great Men
  • Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
    • Plato; or, The Philosopher
  • Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly attractive.
    • Plato; or, The Philosopher
  • Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
    • Montaigne; or, The Skeptic
  • 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?
    • Montaigne; or, The Skeptic
[edit]

The Conduct of Life (1860)

  • Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.
    • Fate
  • Men are what their mothers made them.
    • Fate
  • Coal is a portable climate.
    • Wealth
  • The world is his, who has money to go over it.
    • Wealth
  • Art is a jealous mistress.
    • Wealth
  • All educated Americans, first or last, go to Europe.
    • Culture
  • Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.
    • Culture
  • Shallow men believe in luck.
    • Worship
  • The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
    • Worship
  • I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.
    • Considerations by the Way
  • Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.
    • Considerations by the Way
  • Make yourself necessary to somebody.
    • Considerations by the Way
  • Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
    • Beauty
[edit]

Behavior

  • There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, — now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned.
  • Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.
  • The highest compact we can make with our fellow, is, — "Let there be truth between us two forevermore."
  • 'Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.
[edit]

May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

  • God said, I am tired of kings,
    I suffer them no more;
    Up to my ear the morning brings
    The outrage of the poor.
  • To-day unbind the captive,
    So only are ye unbound;
    Lift up a people from the dust,
    Trump of their rescue, sound!
    • Boston Hymn, st. 17
  • O tenderly the haughty day
    Fills his blue urn with fire;
    One morn is in the mighty heaven,
    And one in our desire.
  • United States! the ages plead,—
    Present and Past in under-song,—
    Go put your creed into your deed,
    Nor speak with double tongue.
    • Ode, st. 5
  • I think no virtue goes with size;
    The reason of all cowardice
    Is, that men are overgrown,
    And, to be valiant, must come down
    To the titmouse dimension.
  • So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
    So near is God to man,
    When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
    The youth replies, I can.
  • England’s genius filled all measure
    Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,
    Gave to the mind its emperor,
    And life was larger than before:
    Nor sequent centuries could hit
    Orbit and sum of Shakespeare’s wit.
    The men who lived with him became
    Poets, for the air was fame.
  • Nor mourn the unalterable Days
    That Genius goes and Folly stays.
  • Fear not, then, thou child infirm,
    There's no god dare wrong a worm.
  • He thought it happier to be dead,
    To die for Beauty, than live for bread.
  • Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill?
    Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.
  • Deep in the man sits fast his fate
    To mould his fortunes, mean or great.
  • For the prevision is allied
    Unto the thing so signified;
    Or say, the foresight that awaits
    Is the same Genius that creates.
    • Fate
  • Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
    Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
    And marching single in an endless file,
    Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
  • It is time to be old,
    To take in sail: -
    The god of bounds,
    Who sets to seas a shore,
    Came to me in his fatal rounds,
    And said: 'No more!
  • Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.
    • Terminus
  • Though love repine, and reason chafe,
    There came a voice without reply,—
    "'Tis man's perdition to be safe,
    When for the truth he ought to die."
    • Sacrifice
  • For what avail the plough or sail,
    Or land or life, if freedom fail?
  • If the red slayer think he slays,
    Or if the slain think he is slain,
    They know not well the subtle ways
    I keep, and pass, and turn again.
    • Brahma, st. 1
    • Composed in July 1856 this poem is derived from a major passage of the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most popular of Hindu scriptures, and portions of it were likely a paraphrase of an existing translation. Though titled "Brahma" its expressions are actually more indicative of the Hindu concept "Brahman".
  • 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.
    • Brahma', st. 2
  • 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.
    • Brahma, st. 3
  • In the vaunted works of Art
    The master stroke is Nature's part.
    • Art
  • Ever from one who comes to-morrow
    Men wait their good and truth to borrow.
  • The music that can deepest reach,
    And cure all ill, is cordial speech.
    • Merlin's Song II
  • Some of your hurts you have cured,
    And the sharpest you still have survived,
    But what torments of grief you endured
    From evils which never arrived!
  • A ruddy drop of manly blood
    The surging sea outweighs,
    The world uncertain comes and goes;
    The lover rooted stays.
[edit]

Society and Solitude (1870)

  • God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.
    • Society and Solitude
  • We boil at different degrees.
    • Eloquence
  • The best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.
    • Eloquence
  • The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
    • Domestic Life
  • 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.
  • Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?
    • Works and Days
  • 'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
    • Success
  • We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.
    • Old Age
[edit]

Civilization

  • The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.
  • Hitch your wagon to a star.
  • 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.
[edit]

Art

  • Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.
  • Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.
  • A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.
[edit]

Letters and Social Aims (1876)

  • Science does not know its debt to imagination.
    • Poetry and Imagination
  • Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.
    • Poetry and Imagination
  • Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.
    • Social Aims
  • I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared " that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow.
    • Social Aims
  • Do not say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contraray.
    • Social Aims
  • Every really able man, in whatever direction he work, - a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter,-if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be.
    • Immortality
  • Every artist was first an amateur.
    • Progress of Culture (see also: Art)
  • Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfilment.
    • Progress of Culture
  • A good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands.
    • Poetry and Imagination
  • Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.
    • The Comic
  • The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men.
    • The Comic
[edit]

Quotation and Originality

  • In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
  • Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.
  • Genius borrows nobly. When Shakepeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life."
  • By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
  • Quotation confesses inferiority.
[edit]

Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883)

  • To live without duties is obscene.
    • Aristocracy
  • Speak the affirmative; emphasize your choice by utter ignoring of all that you reject.
    • The Preacher
  • Genius has no taste for weaving sand.
    • The Scholar
  • A poet in verse or prose must have a sensuous eye, but an intellectual co-perception.
    • Plutarch
[edit]

Attributed

  • A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
  • A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life; he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.
  • All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.
  • As soon as there is life there is danger.
  • Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live, as well as to think.
  • Children are all foreigners.
  • 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.
  • Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
  • Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
  • Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
  • Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.
  • Every man I meet is in some way my superior.
  • Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.
  • Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
  • Give all to love; obey thy heart.
  • I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called history is.
  • I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.
  • I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.
  • I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the Stern Fact, the Sad Self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
  • If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.
  • If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.
  • In different hours a man represents each of several ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin—seven or eight ancestors, at least; and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music that life is.
  • 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 small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.
  • Imagination is not the talent of some men, but is the health of every man.
  • In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?
  • Insist on yourself; never imitate... Every great man is unique.
  • It is an amiable illusion, which the shape of our planet prompts, that every man is at the top of the world.
  • It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, "Always do what you are afraid to do."
  • Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
  • Let not a man guard his dignity, but let his dignity guard him.
  • Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.
  • Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.
  • None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.
  • Obey thyself.
  • People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.
  • Salvation would not be a question of accepting a creed, but of acquiring insight.
  • Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
  • Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.
  • Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon-balls and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.
  • The ancestor of every action is a thought.
  • The Bhagavad Gita is an empire of thought and in its philosophical teachings Lord Krishna has all the attributes of the full-fledged montheistic deity and at the same time the attributes of the Upanisadic absolute.
  • The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
  • The force of character is cumulative.
  • 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 you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with their friendship.
  • The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
  • The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.
  • The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it. (see also: Friendship)
  • The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.... Every influx of atheism, of skepticism, is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion, and making way for truth.
  • The soul is subject to dollars.
  • The voyage of the best ship is a zizzag line of a hundred tacks.
  • The world belongs to the energetic.
  • There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.
  • There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge, and fox, and squirrel.
  • 'Tis the good reader that makes the good book.
  • To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
    • As quoted in The Book of Positive Quotations (1993) PLEASE NOTE: I believe there's some question as to whether this quotation is from Emerson. Please verify.
  • Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies. (see also: Truth & Lies)
  • We do what we must, and call it by the best names.
  • What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.
  • What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
  • When you strike at a king, you must kill him.
  • Whoever is open, loyal, true; of humane and affable demeanour; honourable himself, and in his judgement of others; faithful to his word as to law, and faithful alike to God and man....such a man is a true gentleman.
  • Wit makes its own welcome and levels all distinctions.
  • Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance. (see also: Chance)
  • Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have done singly will justify you now.
  • We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.
  • Whatever limits us, we call Fate.
  • When it is darkest, men see the stars.
[edit]

External Links:

Wikipedia has an article about:
Wikisource has original works written by or about Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Wikimedia Commons has more images and possibly other types of media related to:


Wikiquote links: People - Literary Works - Proverbs - Films - TV Shows - Themes - Categories
bs:Ralph Waldo Emerson

de:Ralph Waldo Emerson es:Ralph Waldo Emerson gl:Ralph Waldo Emerson it:Ralph Waldo Emerson he:ראלף וואלדו אמרסון hu:Ralph Waldo Emerson pt:Ralph Waldo Emerson ru:Эмерсон, Ральф Уолдо sk:Ralph Waldo Emerson sl:Ralph Waldo Emerson tr:Ralph Waldo Emerson zh:愛默生 ku:Ralph Waldo Emerson

Retrieved from "http://www.billionquotes.com/index.php/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson"
Personal tools