Ralph Waldo Emerson: Quotes about nature

Ralph Waldo Emerson was American philosopher, essayist, and poet. Explore interesting quotes on nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1454 quotes88 likes

“To a dull mind all of nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Variant: To the illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

“That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed, but our power to do so is increased.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Variant: That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.

“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.”

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

“Nature hates calculators.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Nature

Source: Nature

“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“For nature beats in perfect tune,
And rounds with rhyme her every rune,
Whether she work in land or sea,
Or hide underground her alchemy.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Woonotes II, st. 7
1840s, Poems (1847)

“In the vaunted works of Art
The master-stroke is Nature's part. 5.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: In the vaunted works of Art
The master-stroke is Nature's part. 5.

“Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source: 1830s, Nature http://www.emersoncentral.com/nature.htm (1836), Ch. 4, Language

“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

“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

“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

“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)

“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

“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)

“Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of the perfect compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give and Take, the doctrine that every thing has its price, — and if that price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and that it is impossible to get any thing without its price, — is not less sublime in the columns of a leger than in the budgets of states, in the laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature. I cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees implicated in those processes with which he is conversant, the stern ethics which sparkle on his chisel-edge, which are measured out by his plumb and foot-rule, which stand as manifest in the footing of the shop-bill as in the history of a state, — do recommend to him his trade, and though seldom named, exalt his business to his imagination.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the fruit of his character.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fate
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)