Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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Thou animated torrid-zone.
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I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.
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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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Born for success he seemed, With grace to win, with heart to hold, With shining gifts that took all eyes.
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There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
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The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance.
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Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
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Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.
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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 are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
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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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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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Olympian bards who sung Divine Ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so.
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My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.
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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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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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Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the fruit of his character.
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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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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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Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.
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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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By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
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Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know.