Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes:

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  • Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man.

  • Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

  • Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the 'Not Me,' that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, 'Nature.'

  • Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

  • Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.

  • A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue.

  • As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

  • Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves.

  • Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

  • We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.

  • Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

  • Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

  • We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.

  • I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

  • The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear.

  • When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

  • Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

  • Beauty without expression is boring.

  • Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

  • Nature hates calculators.

  • Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

  • Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

  • Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.

  • A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

  • Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.

  • Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

  • We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.

  • Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.

  • The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

  • Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

  • The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

  • The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

  • The first wealth is health.

  • No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

  • Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.

  • Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

  • The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

  • We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

  • Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.

  • The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.

  • The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation.

  • It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

  • Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

  • Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

  • We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

  • A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

  • It is not length of life, but depth of life.

  • Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

  • Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

  • A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.

  • Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.

  • There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

  • One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

  • Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.

  • The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.

  • Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.

  • All diseases run into one, old age.

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

  • The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

  • Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

  • The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

  • Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

  • Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

  • He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.

  • Science does not know its debt to imagination.

  • I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.

  • The highest revelation is that God is in every man.

  • Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

  • I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

  • Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.

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

  • Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

  • No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

  • A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

  • We acquire the strength we have overcome.

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

  • No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

  • For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

  • The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

  • In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.

  • Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

  • A man is what he thinks about all day long.

  • Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

  • Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

  • The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

  • Our best thoughts come from others.

  • The earth laughs in flowers.

  • Power and speed be hands and feet.

  • Good men must not obey the laws too well.

  • Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

  • Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

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

  • Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

  • Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

  • All mankind love a lover.

  • People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

  • People only see what they are prepared to see.

  • The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

  • If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.

  • It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all.

  • There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

  • Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.

  • Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

  • Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

  • The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance.

  • A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

  • Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

  • Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

  • Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.

  • Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

  • If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.

  • Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

  • It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.

  • The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

  • Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

  • To be great is to be misunderstood.

  • The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

  • Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.

  • In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

  • Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.

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