Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes - Page 11

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don't trust children with edge tools. Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do the thing and you will have the power.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The virtues are economists, but some of the vices are also...Pride is handsome, economical; pride eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride. Pride can go without domestics, without fine clothes, can live in a house with two rooms, can eat potato, purslain, beans, lyed corn, can work on the soil, can travel afoot, can talk with poor men, or sit silent well contented in fine saloons. But vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last; a long way leading nowhere. Only one drawback; proud people are intolerably selfish, and the vain are gentle and giving.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Money is representative, and follows the nature and fortunes of the owner...The farmer is covetous of his dollar, and with reason. It is no waif to him. He knows how many strokes of labor it represents. His bones ache with the days' work that earned it. He knows how much land it represents - how much rain, frost and sunshine. He knows that, in the dollar, he gives you so much discretion and patience, so much hoeing and threshing. Try to lift his dollar; you must lift all that weight. In the city, where money follows the skit of a pen or a lucky rise in exchange, it comes to be looked on as light.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Money often costs too much
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Does not… the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The god of Victory is said to be one-handed, but Peace gives victory to both sides.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are like travelers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Over the inter glaciers,I see the summer glow,And, through the wild-piled snowdrift,The warm rosebuds below.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Language is fossil poetry
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same
Ralph Waldo Emerson
She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language--not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All things are engaged in writing their history...Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. The ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The student is to read history actively not passively.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The student is to read history actively not passively.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Teach that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us be silent, that we may hear the whisper of God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . .
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Never miss an opportunity of noticing anything of beauty ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. This is the reason why beauty is still escaping out of all analysis. It is not yet possessed, it cannot be handled. …It instantly deserts possession, and flies to an object in the horizon. If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are immensed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty will not come at the call of the legislature.... It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty without expression is boring.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul
Ralph Waldo Emerson