Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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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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Olympian bards who sung Divine Ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so.
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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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Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought.
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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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Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
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Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend; I am not thine.
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Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.
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It may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?
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I wiped away the weeds and foam, And fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.
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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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Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.
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Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
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Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.
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Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves.
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Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
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Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.
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The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.
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As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.
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We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
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Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.
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For the prevision is allied Unto the thing so signified; Or say, the foresight that awaits Is the same Genius that creates.
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It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
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I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.