Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Write it on your heartthat every day is the best day in the year.He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the daywho allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.Finish every day and be done with it.You have done what you could.Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;begin it well and serenely, with too high a spiritto be cumbered with your old nonsense.This new day is too dear,with its hopes and invitations,to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the single man plants himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abides, this huge world will come around to him.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The South-wind bringsLife, sunshine and desire,And on every mount and meadowBreathes aromatic fire;But over the dead he has no power,The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;And, looking over the hills, I mournThe darling who shall not return.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love what is simple and beautiful. These are the essentials.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quotation confesses inferiority.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Language is fossil Poetry.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Me too thy nobleness has taughtTo master my despair,The fountains of my hidden lifeAre through thy friendship fair.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who bring building materials to an architect.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested--'But these impulses may be from below, not from above.' I replied, 'They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil's child, I will live them from the devil.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

the mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,—universal signs, instead of these village symbols,—and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A world in the hand is worth two in the bush.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A mind might ponder its thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

...the poor man, whom the law does not allow to take an ear of corn when starving, nor a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is allowed to put his hand into the pocket of the rich, and say, You shall educate me, not as you will, but as I will...

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Miss Austen’s novels … seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer … is marriageableness.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature. The boat at St. Petersburgh, which plies along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson