Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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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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Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.
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People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.
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Language is the archives of history … Language is fossil poetry.
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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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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 hung my verse in the wind Time and tide their faults will find.
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There is properly no history; only biography.
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All mankind love a lover.
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What you are comes to you.
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There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
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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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We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.
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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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It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.
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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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We boil at different degrees.
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We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
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Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
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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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Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
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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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In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.
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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.