Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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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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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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We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy.
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God enters by a private door into every individual.
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Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
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Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
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Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
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In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.
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Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.
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The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.
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The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
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Thou animated torrid-zone.
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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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Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
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Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.
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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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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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Every burned book enlightens the world.
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Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
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They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt; And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
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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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I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.
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I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.