Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
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Every burned book enlightens the world.
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The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates.
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Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?
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Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
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It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
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Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.
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In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation.
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Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.
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None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.
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Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.
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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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So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.
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But these young scholars who invade our hills, Bold as the engineer who fells the wood, And travelling often in the cut he makes, Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.
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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 method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
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Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.
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To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.
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Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.
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Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows how to play with them as a young child plays with graybeards and in churches.
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Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.
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Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.
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Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
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If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as 'spiritual life,' 'God,' 'soul,' 'cross,' etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.