Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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I hung my verse in the wind Time and tide their faults will find.
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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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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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We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.
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There is properly no history; only biography.
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There is a tendency for things to right themselves.
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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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There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
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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.
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All mankind love a lover.
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We boil at different degrees.
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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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Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
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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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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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Olympian bards who sung Divine Ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so.
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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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What you are comes to you.
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Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
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In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.
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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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We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
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It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.