Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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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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Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
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Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.
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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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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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A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.
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Coal is a portable climate.
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Power and speed be hands and feet.
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Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.
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Reality is a sliding door.
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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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Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.
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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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The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
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Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
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Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
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God enters by a private door into every individual.
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Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
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In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.
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The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.
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Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
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Do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
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The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.
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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.