Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.
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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.
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The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
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There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
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O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.
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With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.
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Good men must not obey the laws too well.
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The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.
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But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.
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Language is the archives of history … Language is fossil poetry.
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Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.
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A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.
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Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.
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For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
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In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.
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We boil at different degrees.
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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!
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I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible
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Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
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Children are all foreigners.
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'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.
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It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.
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There is a tendency for things to right themselves.
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In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.