Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fear always springsfrom ignorance.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly coextensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Your actions speak so loudly, I cannot hear what you are saying.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

If peace is to be maintained, it must be by brave men, who have come up to the same height as the hero, namely, the will to carry their life in their hand, and stake it at any instant for their principle, but who have gone one step beyond the hero, and will not seek another man's life.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don't be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

~ 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

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

Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I covet truth, beauty is unripe childhood's cheat, I leave it behind with the games of youth.

~ 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

We are immensed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.

~ 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

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

Never miss an opportunity of noticing anything of beauty ...

~ 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

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

~ 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

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

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine

~ 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

The student is to read history actively not passively.

~ 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

People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.

~ 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

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson