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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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727 Timeless Quotes Inspiring Self-Discovery, Happiness, and Life's Adventures

Discover the profound wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson through his timeless quotes. From inspiring words on self-discovery and happiness to embracing life's adventures, delve into the brilliance of Emerson's thoughts that will leave you pondering and uplifted.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, known as Waldo, was a renowned American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet. He played a leading role in the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century and was regarded as a champion of individualism. Emerson's philosophy of transcendentalism is best expressed in his essay "Nature" and his speech "The American Scholar," which were highly influential in American intellectual thought. His essays, including "Self-Reliance" and "The Over-Soul," explore ideas of individuality, freedom, and the connection between the soul and the world. Emerson's work had a profound impact on future thinkers, writers, and poets.

Born in Boston in 1803 to a Unitarian minister father and a mother of English ancestry, Emerson grew up surrounded by strong female influences. He attended Harvard College and later became a teacher before spending two years living in nature to study and write. During this time, he faced poor health and traveled to seek warmer climates. It was during his stay in St. Augustine that he encountered the harsh reality of slavery firsthand. This experience further shaped his beliefs and advocacy for individual freedom.

Overall, Ralph Waldo Emerson's ideas on transcendentalism influenced American intellectual thought significantly. His belief in individuality, freedom, and mankind's potential for realization has left a lasting impact on subsequent generations of thinkers and writers alike.

✵ 25. May 1803 – 27. April 1882   •   Other names Ральф Эмерсон
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson: 727   quotes 86   likes

Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

“Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Friendship

Search , Parting , Sincerity

“There are two classes of poets — the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Parnassus, Preface

Love , Education , Nature

“Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate, — and meantime it is only puss and her tail. How long before our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter, and shouting, and we shall find it was a solitary performance?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Experience

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Experience

Fate , Laughter

“As soon as there is life there is danger.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Actually from De l'Allemagne (1813) by Madame de Stael.
Misattributed

Life

“Broader and deeper we must write our annals, from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience, if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), History

Way , Boy , Nature , Light

“Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Fugitive Slave Law http://www.rwe.org/comm/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=75&Itemid=254, a lecture in New York City (7 March 1854), The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1904)

God , Perfection

“O tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire;
One morn is in the mighty heaven,
And one in our desire.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ode http://www.potw.org/archive/potw369.html, st. 1
1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

“I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "LEAVES OF GRASS." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.
I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.
I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging…”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Letter to Walt Whitman, thanking him for a copy of Leaves of Grass (July 21, 1855)

Wisdom , Books , Courage , Nature

“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.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson Music

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), The Poet

Beauty , Soul , Knowledge , Learning

“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.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hymn sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

World

“The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, The Conservative (1841)
Context: The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made. This quarrel is the subject of civil history. The conservative party established the reverend hierarchies and monarchies of the most ancient world. The battle of patrician and plebeian, of parent state and colony, of old usage and accommodation to new facts, of the rich and the poor, reappears in all countries and times. The war rages not only in battle-fields, in national councils and ecclesiastical synods, but agitates every man’s bosom with opposing advantages every hour. On rolls the old world meantime, and now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities.
Such an irreconcilable antagonism of course must have a correspondent depth of seat in the human constitution. It is the opposition of Past and Future, of Memory and Hope, of the Understanding and the Reason. It is the primal antagonism, the appearance in trifles of the two poles of nature.

World

“He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

December 26, 1839
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

Money , Books , Home , Thinking

“Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book The Conduct of Life

The Conduct of Life, Chapter 7, “Considerations by the Way,” Complete Works (1883), vol. 6, p. 237

School , Drawing

“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 book Nature

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nature

Wisdom , Truth , Effort , Animals

“Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Experience

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Experience

“Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Books

Wisdom , Men , Age , Learning

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson Worship

Worship
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)

Peaceful , War , Peace , Victory

“Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance

“The highest compact we can make with our fellow, is, — "Let there be truth between us two forevermore."”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860), Behavior

Truth

“The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1860s, Life and Letters in New England (1867)

Men , Motivation

“Go put your creed into your deed,
Nor speak with double tongue.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ode, Concord, July 4, 1857
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home? I have been quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. …. He that does not fill a place at home, cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a larger crowd. You do not think you will find anything there which you have not seen at home? The stuff of all countries is just the same. Do you suppose there is any country where they do not scald milk-pans, and swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish? What is true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book The Conduct of Life

The Conduct of Life, Chapter 4, “Culture,” p. 145

Men , Justice , Beauty , Travel

“Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wood-notes
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Home

“It is time to be old,
To take in sail: -
The god of bounds,
Who sets to seas a shore,
Came to me in his fatal rounds,
And said: 'No more!”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Terminus http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=l&p=c&a=p&ID=20600&c=323
1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

God , Time , Sea

“The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empires but is not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

4 March 1831
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

God , Truth , Disease , Religion

“Coal is a portable climate.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wealth
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)

“Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book The Conduct of Life

The Conduct of Life, Behaviour
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Support

“There is properly no history; only biography.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), History

History

“My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Friendship

God , Age , Sex

“Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Nature

Source: 1830s, Nature http://www.emersoncentral.com/nature.htm (1836), Ch. 1, Nature

God , Universe , Parting

“We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source: 1830s, Nature http://www.emersoncentral.com/nature.htm (1836), Ch. 8, Prospects

Grass

“The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Goethe; or, the Writer,” p. 272
1850s, Representative Men (1850)

“If a man own land, the land owns him.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wealth
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)

“It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Uses of Great Men,”
1850s, Representative Men (1850)

Men , Beauty , Soul , Painting

“The music that can deepest reach,
And cure all ill, is cordial speech.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Merlin's Song II
1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

Music

“The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Civilization

Country

“Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Considerations by the Way
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)

Art

“When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

10 December 1824
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

Heart

“I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1 October 1848
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

Books , Age , Exercises , Intelligence

“Nothing can be preserved that is not good.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In Praise of Books (1860)

“Every man is wanted and no man is wanted much.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nominalist and Realist

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

History
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Essays, First Series
Variant: Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Nature

“A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Experience

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Experience

Wisdom , Fools

“Act, if you like,—but you do it at your peril. 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. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament. The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and his friends cleave to the form, and lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monastery and his dance; and, although each prates of spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti-spiritual.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Goethe; or, the Writer” p. 271
1850s, Representative Men (1850)

Men , Strong , Dance

“Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fate
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)

Life , Men

“History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, — see how it could and must be.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), History

Law , History , Nature

“I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

27 June 1839
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

Freedom

“A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson English Traits

English Traits, Aristocracy
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Nature

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nature

Way , Nature , Drawing