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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 quotes88 likes

Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

“Self trust is the essence of heroism.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Success
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: Self-trust is the first secret of success.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
Variant: Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none.
Source: Culture, Behavior, Beauty, Books, Art, Eloquence, Power, Wealth, Illusions
Context: Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company.

“I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source: Gifts: an essay

“Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“God enters by a private door into every individual.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A man's library is a sort of harem.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source: Nature and Selected Essays

“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

“We must be our own before we can be another's.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is a luxury to be understood.”

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

Source: Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From evils which never arrived!”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Borrowing From the French http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=l&amp;p=c&amp;a=p&amp;ID=20649&amp;c=323 <br class="br">1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source: Prose and Poetry

“I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source: Self-Reliance

“Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Nature

Source: Nature

“The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

25 May 1843
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)
Variant: The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

“The student is to read history actively not passively.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source: Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nature hates calculators.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Science does not know its debt to imagination.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poetry and Imagination <br class="br">1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Books, Letters and Social Aims http://www.rwe.org/comm/index.php?option=com_content&amp;task=category&amp;sectionid=5&amp;id=74&amp;Itemid=149 (1876)

“Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Quotation and Originality
Source: Prose and Poetry

“Let us advance on Chaos and the Dark”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source: Self-Reliance

“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but though his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“How much of human life is lost in waiting.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Build therefore your own world.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Nature

Source: Nature

“Character is that which can do without success.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Throw a stone into the stream and the ripples that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Nature

Source: Nature

“I am the owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source: History

“There is more in every person's soul than we think.”

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

“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

“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting—a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Though attributed to Emerson in Edwards' A Dictionary of Thoughts (1908), p. 37, this quote originates in Politics for the People (1848) by Charles Kingsley.
Misattributed

“The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.”

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

“So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can!”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Voluntaries
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Source: Emerson: Poems