Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

• Dream
• Illusion
• Another

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

• Consistency
• Minds
• Little

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

• Thought
• Action
• Every

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

• Strength
• Wisdom
• Temptation

Language is the archives of history … Language is fossil poetry.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

• Integrity
• Mind
• Own

Olympian bards who sung Divine Ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so.

O tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire; One morn is in the mighty heaven, And one in our desire.

Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.

Love not the flower they pluck and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

• Yourself
• Somebody
• Make

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.

We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

• Motivational
• Aim
• Mark

A nation never falls but by suicide.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the 'Not Me,' that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, 'Nature.'

• Nature
• Art
• Men

A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

• Friendship
• Friends
• Growth

We boil at different degrees.

We must be our own before we can be another's.

• Brainy
• Own
• Before

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

• Truth
• Roots
• Speak

In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt it, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.

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.

• Strong
• Man
• Men

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, - mettle and bottom.