Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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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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Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
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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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Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought.
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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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Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
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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 are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
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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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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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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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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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Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.
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Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.
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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 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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One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly.
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Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
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There is always safety in valor.
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Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.
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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.