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

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 727 quotes88 likes

Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

“When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions. Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God have, from time to time, walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“Hast thou named all the birds without a gun;
Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Forbearance http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/forebearance.htm 1840s, Poems (1847)

“A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs;
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Epigraph to Friendship
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Essays, First Series
Variant: A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs;
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.

“The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Natural History of Intellect (1893) http://www.rwe.org/natural-history-of-intellect.html

“And every man, in love or pride,
Of his fate is ever wide.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nemesis
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Power is in nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Friendship
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Essays, First Series

“God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Society and Solitude
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Said to a young Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had written a piece critical of Plato in response to his earlier conversation with Emerson, as reported by Felix Frankfurter in Harlan Buddington Phillips, Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (1960), p. 59

“It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, — "Always do what you are afraid to do."”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Heroism
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841)

“In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Letters and Social Aims, Quotation and Originality
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“But these young scholars who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes,
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Blight http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/blight.htm, st. 2 1840s, Poems (1847)

“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Divinity College Address (1838) : full title “An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday Evening, July 15, 1838”, given at Harvard Divinity School : as contained in The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Writings, Emerson, ed. David M Robinson, Beacon Press (2004), p. 78 : ISBN 0807077194

“We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Old Age
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1839
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

“Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Walter Savage Landor, from The Dial, XII

“What is there in 'Paradise Lost' to elevate and astonish like Herschel or Somerville?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson, the Mind On Fire (Univ. of Calif Press 1995), p. 124

“Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly attractive.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Plato; or, The Philosopher
1850s, Representative Men (1850)

“Circles, like the soul, are neverending and turn round and round without a stop”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

This adage had previously appeared, identically worded, in Coleridge's The Statesman's Manual (1816)
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Circles

“And striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

May-Day
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the existing generation is invalided and degenerate? … A more subtle and severe criticism might suggest that some dislocation has befallen the race; that men are off their centre; that multitudes of men do not live with Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Quotation and Originality

“For 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.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson Music

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

“Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“United States! the ages plead, —
Present and Past in under-song, —
Go put your creed into your deed,
Nor speak with double tongue.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ode, st. 5
1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

“Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
Nor time unmake what poets know.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The Test", as quoted in Emerson As A Poet (1883) by Joel Benton, p. 40

“Language is the archives of history … Language is fossil poetry.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson Music

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

“Never read any book that is not a year old.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In Praise of Books
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Intellect
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)

“When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field the next man will appear.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“God said, I am tired of kings,
I suffer them no more;
Up to my ear the morning brings
The outrage of the poor.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Boston Hymn http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/1177/, st. 2 1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

“Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others, and this is a gift interred only by the self.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Experience

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

“Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the state.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Journal, 328, Nov. 15, 1839, http://www.perfectidius.com/Volume_5_1838-1841.pdf 1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

“Earth proudly wears the Parthenon
As the best gem upon her zone.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

St. 3 1840s, Poems (1847), The Problem http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/problem.htm

“Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

History
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Essays, First Series

“Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)

“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Friendship
Variant: A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud…

“Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word Politic, which now for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Art

“Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Parnassus, Preface (1874)

“There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Books
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Fear not, then, thou child infirm;
There's no god dare wrong a worm.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Compensation
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: Fear not, then, thou child infirm;
There's no god dare wrong a worm.

“Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young
And always keep us so.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ode to Beauty
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young
And always keep us so.

“What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; — show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; — and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)

“For what are they all in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good Bye
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: For what are they all in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?