Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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We are wiser than we know.
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Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.
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It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.
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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.
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Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
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There is properly no history; only biography.
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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.
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What you are comes to you.
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People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
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There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
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Olympian bards who sung Divine Ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so.
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Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.
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The highest revelation is that God is in every man.
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Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.
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He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
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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.
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We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul.
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I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.
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It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
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People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
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When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.
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We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.
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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.
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Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.