Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes - Page 8

New York is a sucked orange.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing external to you has any power over you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. These gay natures contrast with the somewhat stern countenance of ordinary nature: they are like music heard out of a work-house. Nature does not cocker us; we are children, not pets; she is not fond; everything is dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe universal laws. Yet these delicate flowers look like the frolic and interference of love and beauty. Men use to tell us that we love flattery even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted. Something like that pleasure, the flowers give us: what am I to whom these sweet hints are addressed?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well half an hour?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a difference between truly listening and waiting for your turn to talk.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fame is proof that people are gullible.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitants of the northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good. 'Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are always getting ready to live, but never living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.... It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
True love transcends the unworthy object, and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A day is a miniature eternity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The earth laughs in flowers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society is wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Virtues are in the popular estimate rather the exception than the rule.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
there is no planet, sun, or star could hold you if you but knew what you are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain sublime assurance of success, but as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it today because it is not of today.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Imitation cannot go above its model.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is known by the books he reads.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Marriage is the perfection of what love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then is he caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thought is the property of those only who can entertain it. -
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You Life is a progress, and not a station.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task oftmeeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.The foe long since in silence slept;Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;And Time the ruined bridge has sweptDown the dark stream which seaward creeps.On this green bank, by this soft stream,We set to-day a votive stone;That memory may their deed redeem,When, like our sires, our sons are gone.Spirit, that made those heroes dareTo die, and leave their children free,Bid Time and Nature gently spareThe shaft we raise to them and thee.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
One idea lights a thousand candles.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To laugh often and much,to win the respect of the intelligent peopleand the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest criticsand endure the betrayal of false friends;to appreciate beauty;to find the best in others; to leave the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Things refuse to be mismanaged for long.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Yes, but does Maine have anything to SAY to Florida?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But if a man be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this.
Ralph Waldo Emerson