Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.
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The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself.
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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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Out from the heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old.
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There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
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I hung my verse in the wind Time and tide their faults will find.
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Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought.
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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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We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
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You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
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Born for success he seemed, With grace to win, with heart to hold, With shining gifts that took all eyes.
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In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, - seven or eight ancestors at least, - and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.
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Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
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The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.
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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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Thou animated torrid-zone.
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By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
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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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Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.
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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 the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.
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The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
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We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.